


The Heart That I Love

by misdre



Category: Bakuten Shoot Beyblade, Beyblade
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Classical Music, Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:14:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 29,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27046315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misdre/pseuds/misdre
Summary: A Max-centric story about him being a piano prodigy and the son of a world-famous pianist attending a competitive music school in New York - and the development of his relationship with Rei, a no-name violinist from China who turns out to have a surprising connection to Max's best friend, Mao.
Relationships: Kon Rei | Ray Kon/Mizuhara Max | Max Tate, see ch.1 notes for minor pairings
Comments: 23
Kudos: 11





	1. Intro

**Author's Note:**

> so this is a story that i have started at least four times over, it started as the college AU addition to my list of all the most overused AU tropes as reimax fics, then i wanted to do a classical music AU inspired by la corda d'oro (if you happen to know that obscure series, you'll see this is basically a corda AU tbh), then these two somehow got combined and this is the result. i'm hoping that i'll actually finish it this time but we'll see.  
> the primary focus of this fic is on max and rei, but there's also mentions or implications of kai/max, rick/max, mao/rei, rei/salima and hiromi/kai. (maybe also kai/rei if you look hard enough and have a wild imagination)  
> the story is SFW but, since this is a proper college AU (lol), there's some sexual innuendo in there every now and then.  
> also as a warning, michael is a total asshole in this story, sorry dude you just were a convenient character for the role.  
> ALSO as a warning, i'm from europe and don't actually know shit about new york or american college.  
> ALSO ALSO as a warning, my own extent of playing an instrument is that i played the piano as a kid so all the music stuff may not be even remotely accurate most of the time. this is all Extreme Googling And Watching A Lot Of YouTube
> 
> i will include links to all the songs referred in the story on chapter end notes; the final chapter will talk more about the actual title song of this fic (assuming i ever get that far?? well i fucking hope)

A tiny creek of sweat trickles down the nape of Max’s neck, down to the back of the pristine white collar of his shirt. He lifts his chin a little, fiddles with his fingers behind his back. His deep blue eyes hover over the audience, careful to not lock eyes with anybody, instead fixating on the glossy arm of one of the empty concert hall chairs.

There’s no reason for him to be nervous, yet he is. This isn’t supposed to mean anything to him, not this time around. Last year was different – the hysterical excitement of that night a year ago is still surprisingly fresh in his memory, the night when he found out that he would be participating in the annual music competition, not only the most important event of the year in the BBA School of Music but also a notable affair in the New York region and the classical music scene; an event that has grown bigger and bigger each year, to the point that the participants are now treated as celebrities at the BBA; an event whose winner gets a significant head start for their career as a musician. Last year’s winner, Zeo Zagart, is now a world-renown genius violinist; the winner from two years back, Ming-Ming, has gone off to become an international super star not only as a flautist but also as a modeling pop star.

But Max already had his shot one year prior, and the way the whole ordeal went down for him… The fingers of his right hand instinctively cross over to his left, caressing the sensitive skin as if to protect it from the devilish tendrils of the past.

He has no intention or resolution whatsoever to repeat the experience. He’s only participating in the competition qualifiers to appease his mother, who never quite got over her disappointment when he missed the opportunity to win last time and live up to his status as her son.

On the other hand, he wanted to participate in the qualifiers this year for the opportunity to play a composition of his own in public for the first time. It went well, perfectly even; the audience gave him a standing ovation that left him basking in the warm glow of self-satisfaction and other people’s admiration. He got what he wanted, and his mother got what she wanted, and that’s all there is to this qualifier concert.

And yet…

Max swallows hard, his throat suddenly about as dry as the sand dunes of the Sonoran Desert. His hands have begun to sweat in each other’s grip and his heart hammers just a bit faster than it rationally thinking should if this really has no meaning to him. He doesn’t even want to qualify for the competition a second time… or so he’s been telling himself – and everyone else – all this time.

_And yet._

Finally, the announcer’s voice cuts through the nervous energy of the hall like a knife sinking into a sponge cake.


	2. The piano

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can assume that the japanese characters are speaking japanese with each other, hence the surname-firstname order and calling manabu "kyouju".

“Kyouju, you’re small so you can push your way in there – just close enough to take a pic.”

“Alright, alright…”

Manabu reaches for his iPhone, and the next moment he has plunged into the crowd that’s blocking the corridor. Just about the entire school has packed itself in front of a single sheet of paper put up on the main notice board: the list announcing all the final participants of this year’s competition, along with their instruments. It’s impossible for the small Japanese group of friends to see anything from the back of the insane crowd – literally small, as the great majority of the school’s students are of Western origin and about a head taller than them. Being half American doesn’t help Max in this regard, as he’s apparently inherited his height from his Japanese father, but he’s also not overly enthusiastic to see the list to begin with.

After all, he knows his name isn’t included in there.

“I didn’t know you care so much about the competition,” he says to Takao, the one who just ushered their even shorter friend, whom they affectionately call “professor” in Japanese, to dive in for a picture. “I thought you hated it.”

“Gotta know what the hottest gossip of the next few months is gonna be about,” Takao says defensively. The truth is written all over his face; perhaps this is exactly why he’s been so loud about not having any interest in the competition these past days. He’s been claiming that he only showed the minimum obligatory interest last year due to Max being one of the participants, but it’s so characteristic of Takao to put up a show just so he doesn’t need to admit that he’s interested in what he, a Japanese folk music major with no business to participate in the competition, considers the snobby inner circle of the music school.

Manabu is back a moment later, and the three boys withdraw to a less crowded spot to view the 6-name list in peace.

> _Rick Anderson: double bass_
> 
> _Kai Hiwatari: cello_
> 
> _Ralf Jürgens: piano_
> 
> _Rei Kon: violin_
> 
> _Boris Kuznetsov: violin_
> 
> _Hiromi Tachibana: euphonium._

“Whoa!” a yell immediately escapes Max’s mouth, “Rick got through! Wow, he’s really picked up the slack from earlier, then. I mean, it’s not like I thought he’s _bad_ but…”

“What’s with these weirdo instruments?” is Takao’s first comment. “Euphonium? Double bass? Are there even songs for those?”

“There’s two violins this year,” says Manabu.

“And two Japanese,” Max adds, pointing at the second and the last name on the list. He doesn’t recall having met this Hiromi Tachibana before, but the other one – he certainly recognizes the name "Hiwatari" of the Hiwatari Enterprise.

“Or three,” Takao says, “not sure where to place this ‘Rei Kon’ person. And isn’t Hiwatari Kai, like, part of some gang? I’m pretty sure I’ve heard some shit about that guy being a delinquent.”

“Yep, that’s him. Well, not anymore, obviously – he wouldn’t have been allowed in the BBA otherwise. I guess he’s the real deal as a cellist, then. The more you know…”

He’s also pretty damn hot, but Max doesn’t bother mentioning this mundane detail to Takao and Manabu. Kai Hiwatari is like a nuclear waste site, fascinating to observe from afar but too intimidating (potentially deadly) to approach.

“Do you know this pianist?” Manabu then asks Max.

“No, he’s not in my year. The name sounds European – German, I think.” As Max keeps staring at the list, he can gradually feel a vague, subtle yet noticeable nausea begin to churn in his stomach.

_My name could have been in there._ And then: _They decided that all of these people were better than me._

Disappointment, a feeling so alien to him, has hit him a lot harder than he expected or wants to admit. Max has never considered himself a particularly proud person – competitive perhaps, but not proud or vain in this way – yet the feeling that first hit him once he realized that he wasn’t picked for the competition a second time was a shallow, even childish sense of bitterness. _There’s no way all of these people were better than me_ , followed by thoughts of injustice and how the judging must have been partial somehow – that they only didn’t pick him to avoid repeating a contestant from last year (which had happened a few times in the past). His mother blamed it on the fact that he chose to play his own composition; she’s been positively livid at him for it for two days now, as if his choice of song was a personal offense toward her.

The piano has always been the one thing that nobody can beat Max at. To put it simply, he is used to being praised for it – to being the very best. Falling short from even qualifying for the competition this year is a harsh reality check, one that he’s having a hard time chewing.

Max isn’t thrilled about having such thoughts as a knee-jerk reaction; it has, for the first time, made him consider that perhaps he _is_ the spoiled brat that so many of his piano peers detest him for.

Not to mention that he supposedly didn’t even _want_ to participate a second time. Why, then, did it sting so damn much?

* * *

Although Max has inherited the instrument from his mother, with whom he has somewhat questionable relations at this stage of life (the accumulation of her choices regarding the combination of family and her career as one of the world’s most famous pianists), the piano has always been like a best friend to him, a source of infinite inspiration and a safe haven from the hardships of life. In the past, he has gone through occasional phases of feeling less motivated, phases of the instrument turning to nothing but a tool – and a bothersome one at that, a tool that he simply has to work with every single day to stay in touch – but for the vast majority of time, to Max, sitting down on the cushioned bench is a sign of comfort and the feeling of the smooth monochrome keys under his fingers a gateway to someplace far away.

Max isn’t exactly a synesthet, but he has always been able to see music as pictures – as entire sceneries, as great adventures. This tendency of his emerges especially strong whenever he’s learning to play a new piece on the piano; as he moves along the melody, the scenery is also being built around him like a jigsaw puzzle, creating a complete picture piece by piece; and once he has mastered the song, he’s able to freely traverse and immerse himself in the world inside that puzzle. Some pieces have a more relaxed or soothing scenery than others, some are exciting and thrilling – even deliciously sinister in the way that a good horror film can be. Setting himself down in front of a piano is always an invitation to a world of his choice.

The song that Max played in the competition qualifier is what he considers his own little magnum opus. It’s a composition that he has been working on for a very long time, developing and polishing, nurturing it like a precious plant in his personal garden, a project that he’s always come back to between schoolwork and other practice. The song itself is no garden to him, though; its melody has always painted the image of a starry sky and the distant view of planet Earth on his mind’s canvas, a scenery from outer space.

He calls it “the Milky Way Song”. Even now, when the composition is complete in the sense that he has performed it in public for the first time and officially put his name on it, Max doesn’t actually have a title for the song. That part has never been his forte in creating things.

_Maybe that’s why it didn’t convince the judges_ , he catches himself thinking. _Maybe it’s too anonymous. It lacks personality._

And now, when he plays the song to nobody but himself, he suddenly feels like the usual static view of aimlessly floating in outer space is no longer enough for this song. Perhaps it’s not completed yet after all – perhaps it needs a new direction to grow in.


	3. Max

Max has never quite fit in with other people. It seems that no matter where he goes, there’s always something just slightly askew with him in some way: he’s either too Japanese or too American, too loud and too quirky or not loud and quirky enough – and too famous as the son of Judy Tate, too privileged for most people.

Max spent the early years of his life in New York, living a rather secluded life with his stay-at-home father while his mother was busy with her career – an arrangement that was considered eccentric by other people and one that Max’s father, Tarou Mizuhara, a Japanese businessman by trade, also couldn’t tolerate in the long run. His parents ended up separating for the time being, and Max moved to a small town in the outskirts of Tokyo with his father, back to his family’s old house. Life in Japan, however, was extremely rough for Max who had already spent the formative years of his childhood as an American; no Japanese child wanted or was allowed to befriend the fair-haired, blue-eyed, freckle-faced foreigner who spoke a strange mishmash of a language that combined both English and Japanese. Furthermore, the culture shock of not only switching countries but also standards of living from the high end of New York to borderline rural Japan was a lot for a child to digest. The only thing that seemed to tie his old and new lives together at the time was the piano, which then became Max’s lifeline with the relief of escapism that it provided. Songs had already become tangible adventures to him that engaged all five of his senses back then.

Max had gone through one year of middle school in Japan when his parents decided to get back together: Max and Tarou would go back to the States to move in with Judy once again. Max didn’t mind going back, as Japan never quite felt like home to him and he’d had a hard time making any friends or even being accepted by his teachers – and as long as he wasn’t separated from the piano, he didn’t really care which country he lived in. At least he wouldn’t be picked on for his looks anymore once they were back in New York.

From there onwards, life was good to him for the next few years. Max finally made some good friends at school, he was respected for his background and was quickly becoming a piano prodigy in the footsteps of his mother, which at the time was the most important thing in the world to him. His mother had started working as an instructor and the head of the piano department in one of the area’s most prestigious music schools, the BBA School of Music, and it was only natural to plan for Max to start attending the BBA once he graduated from high school. It was a no-brainer to him, really; he never even considered any other option, and it was what his mother expected of him. She wouldn't be able to teach him for the sake of conflict of interest, but she would regardless be the head of his department and technically his boss at school from there on.

Max didn’t see any problem in this, at first. It didn’t even cross his mind that there could be any problems in this arrangement.

However, several problems did emerge. The first one was simply Max’s own view of his mother, which had begun to drastically change now that Max was older and able to see the bigger picture of what his family life and especially his mother’s attitude toward him and his father had been like ever since his childhood. He’d begun to realize the way Judy had always put her career, her personal interests and ambitions before everything else, including family; and even now, when Max is well over eighteen years old, she still treats him as some sort of trophy, her property and a miniature version of herself, and he’s understood for the first time the insane expectations that have been piled upon him from young age and the strain it has put on his personal life and emotional development. All of these realizations, which came forward to Max like droplets raining down from the sky over the course of a couple of years, are now gradually shaping his opinion of his mother into something starkly negative.

The second problem was that Max had not considered the impact of him being Judy’s son in an actual prestigious school of music. Needless to say, everyone at the BBA knew her; many were fans of her and very excited about meeting him – and others, well, were not. The very first weeks of Max’s attendance in the BBA School of Music were tinged with accusations that he had leeched off his mother to get in and other such gossip prompted by his privileged position as a celebrity teacher’s son. And things didn’t get any better from there onwards, not with his admission to participate in the annual competition in the September of his very first year at BBA. A good bunch of the piano majors who had failed to qualify had been bitter towards him ever since – especially the so-called PPB, a group of piano majors under Judy’s personal training program. They positively loathed Max and had on multiple occasions tried to make his life as bothersome as possible.

And being just a little impulsive, easily provoked and armed with a knack for wanting to give people a piece of their own medicine in defense (a trait that he had developed after silently enduring bullying for years), Max ended up in all sorts of fights and other trouble a bit more often than he should have. At least he’d made the smart decision of moving to the school dorms when he began attending the BBA, as his only saving grace was hiding there from his mother after such incidents. He made sure to be in flawless condition by the time he went back home for his days off… or made up lies of having to stay at school to study or practice all weekend. He’d originally chosen to live at the dorms to slowly build up on becoming more independent, but it had proved useful in ways he hadn’t initially considered.

Such as how having a big, bulky guy like Rick Anderson as a roommate wasn’t half bad a thing.


	4. The six contestants

Once the trio of Takao, Manabu and Max are out for a lunch break, they gather around Manabu’s laptop to view the video recordings of all the participants’ qualifier performances. The videos have been posted on the school’s YouTube channel in what couldn’t exactly be called stellar quality; they had probably been recorded using an average phone, several rows away from the front. They can hardly make out any details of the small figures of the performers on the stage.

“I guess it could be worse,” Manabu says, pounding the volume button as Rick’s double bass performance begins on the screen. The low, soft yet rhythmic notes of the bass start pouring out of the laptop speakers.

“I had no idea the bass could be played like that,” Takao says. “It’s pretty cool. I have new-found respect!”

“I didn’t know he’s that good, either, honestly,” Max admits, feeling apologetic toward his roommate. “Rick’s more of a jazz band type of guy.”

He knows that this resonates with Takao, who has always wanted to start his own garage band. Takao is a folk music major who plays nothing but the guitar on his free time – the result of a clash of his family’s interests and his own. His immigrant family has a long tradition of being folk musicians, which was why they wanted Takao to attend the only conservatory in the state with a degree in Japanese music; the BBA is under the Japanese ownership of its headmaster, Kogorou Daitenji.

Manabu, on the other hand, is a music theory major whose main instrument is his own voice. He sings like an angel, a fact that anybody who doesn’t know him personally would never believe from his geeky character. (Little do they know, he grew up singing anime karaoke on a daily basis and has since evolved past the level of mere karaoke – although he still loves anime songs.)

They watch Kai Hiwatari’s video next, and it leaves all three a bit speechless. His cello performance is captivating from the very first second, aggressive yet immensely delicate in the way he delivers every single note of the complex piece with perfection. It’s almost dizzying to follow along – and lasts for nine exhausting minutes.

“Well,” says Takao once Kai finally lifts his bow off the strings, “that guy just fucking killed it, didn’t he.”

“I can see where he channels that delinquent side of himself,” Manabu breathes out a sigh. True enough, there’s something almost devilish in the whimsical cello piece.

“That was pretty sexy,” says Max.

Ralf Jürgen’s piano performance is next, and it’s a difficult one for Max to assess fairly. He can’t but compare everything about the tall, broad-shouldered European guy and his performance to his own and wonder why the judges deemed this one so much better than his, accompanied by petty, jealous thoughts of the _I don’t think he’s that special_ fashion. Perhaps at a later time, once the wound isn’t so fresh anymore, Max can study Ralf’s performance in a constructive way and learn a thing or two from him – but that day’s not today. Today he wants to be petty and childish about it.

The two violinists are next, and they couldn’t be any different from each other – both appearance and performance-wise. The first one, the mysterious Rei Kon, plays a beautiful and melancholic piece which, despite the low quality of the recording and the fact that his figure is too distant to really make out in detail, seems to radiate an aura of tranquility and sadness through the laptop screen. The whole performance embodies the sort of melodrama that is to be expected of the violin, except for one striking exception from the usual.

“Is that a white violin?” Manabu asks, all three of them squinting at the laptop.

“I didn’t know they can be white,” Takao says, nodding his head.

“Me neither, but I guess there’s no reason why they couldn’t be different colors,” Max ponders, his freckled nose almost touching the screen in a pointless attempt to see the strange instrument better. “It’s probably custom-made.”

The second violinist, undoubtedly of Russian descent judging from his name, has a slightly bulkier form and walks over to the stage with an aggressive stride that already speaks for itself. His performance is everything that Rei Kon’s is not: bold, energetic, fast-paced, every twist and turn in the piece feeling like a lash of a whip.

“And that’s violin on steroids,” Takao comments.

The last one is the Japanese girl with a euphonium, Hiromi. None of the three boys are too familiar with brass instruments so they cannot judge the seemingly plain performance (especially after Boris’s insane violin solo), but it’s certainly a peaceful finish and very pleasing to the ear, with a sort of sensual sound.

“It’s definitely going to be an interesting year,” Manabu then says as he closes the YouTube tab. “And you can just sit back and enjoy it this time,” he adds, turning to face Max, “without worrying about participating.”

“Yeah,” Max replies half-heartedly, not yet convinced that it’s at all what he actually wants. Inside his mind, he’s already creating a SWOT analysis of the pros and cons of the competition just to remind himself why he didn’t want to repeat the experience.

* * *

When he was a participant a year ago, Max didn’t even realize just how crazy the entire school got with the competition. Being on the other side of things now, he can see that everyone has, indeed, gone absolutely crazy about it; everyone everywhere seems to talk about nothing but, and now that the competition season has started, Max hardly ever sees Rick in their dorm room anymore.

A few things also become apparent during the following week, confirmed by Manabu who somehow manages to always be on top of all the social gossip and common opinions of what’s going on around the school. According to his empirical research, the forerunners of this year’s competition and the fan favorites are Kai Hiwatari and Rei Kon. It doesn’t surprise Max that Kai’s bad boy background seems to appeal to the girls (bad boy background combined with some serious talent with a surprisingly sexy instrument, to keep in mind). Manabu has also managed to find out that Rei Kon is a first-year Chinese transfer student, personally scouted by Headmaster Daitenji on one of his trips to his homeland, Japan, where Rei was studying at the time.

“So he’s sugar-daddied by the Headmaster?” Takao scoffs at this piece of news. “Isn’t it unfair that he’s allowed in the competition? He’s in a more favorable position!”

“Well, the Headmaster isn’t one of the judges, so I don’t think so,” says Manabu and throws a slightly nervous look Max’s way, knowing full well that Max was accused in a similar fashion a year ago for being in a privileged position because of his mother.

“I heard that violinists are annoying, anyway,” Takao carries on with his slander. “Drama-hoes.”

“I’d want to see this guy up close,” Max says cheerfully, disregarding Takao’s negativity. “I heard he’s a total dreamboat, but it’s really hard to get close to the participants now. I remember how hectic the beginning was, so no wonder. There’re all kinds of orientation meetings and learning the rules and picking selections and all.”

A mysterious transfer student from China with a white violin… It’s like something out of a shoujo manga, and it tickles Max’s interest in just the right way.

“It will be difficult to get past all the fangirls if you ever come across him, too,” Manabu says.

“Seriously?” barks Takao. “These guys have _fangirls_ flocking to them? That’s ridiculous. Okay, I’m done hearing about that stupid competition. Done! Do me a favor and let me have a break from it even in your company, guys.”

Max and Manabu exchange looks and suppressed grins, both knowing how poorly Takao deals with jealousy.

It’s a fair request, however, as news and gossip and all sort of gushing about the competition and its participants is impossible to escape on campus.


	5. An encounter

Max has very little free time outside schoolwork and practice, and on the occasional Friday night when he could catch a break, his mother often wants him to accompany her to concerts held at the school’s music hall, both for the sake of not forgetting what it’s actually like being on the side of the audience watching an orchestra, and as a form of some mother-and-son bonding thing that Max doesn’t recall ever agreeing to. After these concert nights Judy usually gives him a ride home for the weekend, which Max would prefer to politely decline if it wasn’t for his five-year-old baby sister whose growth spurt he’s completely missing while staying at the campus. She’s pretty much the only reason for him to ever go back home now.

Max is tagging along with his mother on such a Friday night this week. They are just making their way across the lobby area of the concert hall, stopping to wait for the tidal wave of concert-goers to retreat to the cloakroom to avoid the worst jam of people, when his eyes suddenly fall on a familiarly plump figure a few feet to their left: the school’s headmaster. Next to Headmaster Daitenji is another person that he’s engaged in a busy conversation with – a person that immediately captivates all of Max’s attention… for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is that he is not only wearing an amazingly stylish combination of a topcoat and a full suit but also has the longest, most beautiful hair that Max has ever seen on another guy before: a dark braid cascading down, down, down his back, past his waist like a rope of fine black silk.

The second reason is that, as Headmaster Daitenji suddenly calls out to Judy and Max and the other, younger man also turns to look at them, Max recognizes his face. And when he does, the curious smile that has crept on Max’s own face is suddenly wiped away and replaced with a look of utter horror.

He’s only seen the face of this beautiful stranger once before, but it’s that striking allure that makes it so unforgettable and easy to place.

Daitenji’s next words, spoken in Japanese, certainly don’t help. “Oh, Max-kun, have you met Kon Rei-kun before? He’s one of the contestants this year – but I’m sure you already know that! I was so pleased to be able to grant his wish and bring him all the way to New York this summer – and I was certainly right about his potential, if I dare say so myself.”

Max isn’t the kind to be embarrassed easily, but now he definitely is as he clumsily bows his head toward Rei, not sure whether he should be offering to shake hands with him in the Western style or give him an Asian greeting instead.

“Hello,” he mumbles in Japanese, following the example set by Daitenji. “I’m Mizuhara Max. Nice to meet you.”

Rei follows suit, introduces himself in fluent Japanese and bows at both the mother and son. He’s keeping his face so straight that it’s impossible for Max to read his expression. If there’s even the slightest of possibilities that he actually doesn’t recognize Max back… it would certainly help him to not think back to this embarrassing reunion every single night before falling asleep for the next seven days.

Judy and Daitenji exchange some words that exit Max’s other ear as soon as they have entered the other; he’s far too dazed by this not-first first meeting with the Chinese violinist; and then Judy is already tucking at his sleeve to drag him along.

“Come on, Max, or we won’t be home by Charlotte’s bedtime. She’ll be cranky in the morning if she misses you.”

As soon as they’re walking away, Max realizes that all he did was stare at Rei wide-eyed, which is not only rude but downright weird, possibly creepy, and definitely not the way he wants to present himself in front of the most gorgeous guy he’s ever laid his eyes on.

Not that he can salvage the first impression anymore at this point, anyway.


	6. Three weeks earlier

The fight had been ignited by something completely pointless again – Max wasn’t sure, since he’d been a bit too wasted for his own liking by that point of the evening, but Michael Summers had once again been running his big, ugly mouth about something and Max had attempted to hit him with something (he didn’t remember what anymore), which was never a good idea considering that Michael was a head taller than him and also had some actual muscle from playing baseball whenever he wasn’t practicing the piano under Judy’s diligent schedule. Michael had grabbed Max and shoved his head against a concrete wall, and Max didn’t even know how he’d managed to get out of that situation alive, but he was regardless now dragging his feet to reach one of the campus area’s bicycle shelters looming in front of him, hoping to reach it before the rain would get any harder than it already was, and he was aware that some part of him was bleeding but he wasn’t entirely sure which one.

Finally, after what felt like hauling himself across the entire New York (but was most likely about a dozen feet in reality), Max collapsed under the roof of the shelter, causing one of the parked bicycles to fall over and crash to another bike, which crashed to another bike, which crashed to another like domino tiles. He lay there panting for a moment before rolling over and sitting up, his mind swimming.

He brought a hand up to his right ear. Apparently this part of him was bleeding, where Michael had scraped his head against the wall. The rain had already washed some of it away, but Max quickly came to the conclusion that he had nothing to stop the bleeding with, unless he tore a piece off his shirt or something, which he didn’t really want to do as the September night had taken a chilly turn with this sudden downpour and all.

It was an idiotic situation. Max took out his phone, not sure what he was thinking of doing with it, and noticed with a two-second delay that the smooth screen had shattered into smithereens in his pocket and become completely unresponsive.

“Shit,” he said out loud, dropped the phone on the ground and covered his face with his hands. _Mom’s going to kill me._ Why had he even been drinking tonight, what demons possessed him to do this and to mess with the PPB as well? He would have been better off staying the weekend at home looking after Charlotte, playing with her cute pink and red and yellow plastic instruments, including a small toy piano that was Max’s favorite but not so much hers. He didn’t mind – it’d be better if Judy didn’t try and make another miniature version of herself out of Charlotte and dump the myriad expectations of a stellar pianist career on her like she had on him… Maybe Charlotte could become a flautist or a guitarist or something else entirely, a fire fighter or a police officer—

“Excuse me…”

The voice was so close that Max jumped a little. He dropped his hands immediately and saw a person standing there, staring down at him, holding onto an umbrella. The bike shelter’s yellow light fell on the young man in front of Max in a way that made him positively radiate in Max’s tired eyes, giving his appearance a divine glow that only emphasized the stranger’s sharp, elegant features and made his eyes shine with gold as they peered down at Max, concerned.

_Holy Jesus_ , Max thought, almost certain that this amazingly radiant Asian guy was a product of his imagination, with a weird tint of piety in there for some reason.

“Are you okay?” the person asked. “I saw some blood…” Although he spoke English with a thick accent, even his voice sounded like something out of this world in Max’s bleeding ear, so melodic and somehow androgynous, and he only became more unreal by each passing second.

“Just a scratch,” Max said dismissively and tried to curl into a ball on the ground, hugging his knees tightly against himself, as if that would help him to disappear from this stranger’s view.

The person then knelt down in front of Max and reached to the pocket of his coat. He took out a piece of cloth and handed it over.

“Here, press this hard against the bleeding part. It’s better than nothing.”

Max thanked him and took the handkerchief or whatever it was. He pressed it against his ear tightly and, now quickly sobering up, realized that this maybe wasn’t his delirious imagination – but if it wasn’t, it meant that some incredibly kind and handsome stranger really had just found him sitting here drunk in a bicycle shelter in the rain and bothered to check on him. The emotion that this sparked in Max’s heart was a mixture of being mortified with embarrassment and “please marry me immediately”.

And then the stranger was suddenly gone, with a coy “take care” before his dark figure disappeared into the rain like some sort of spiritual deity, a god of rain.

When he thought back to this encounter afterwards, the only thing keeping Max from dismissing it as a drunken hallucination was the red handkerchief that had been left to him and was very much real. He carefully doused it in cold water, and as the dark, grotesque stain of blood washed away, he noticed for the first time that the cloth wasn’t just red. Instead, it was adorned with a black-and-white yinyang pattern.


	7. Rei

It’s Monday again and a good, new week for Max to pretend that he has never in his life met Rei Kon the violinist and most certainly has never embarrassed himself in front of him. Never. Nuh-uh.

Thankfully Max’s schedule is so packed through the day that he doesn’t really have the time to keep wallowing in self-pity. It’s back to practice, practice, practice.

Max has a favorite practice piano on campus, and he always reserves the same practice room (it’s one of the better air-conditioned rooms; he learned early on to fight for those) for the same set of hours for an entire month in advance, which has basically turned the room into his second home at school. He heads there every day for three hours after classes.

After one such three-hour practice session, a good chunk of which consisted of him either spacing out staring at a wall, doodling in a sketchbook or browsing his phone, Max packs his bag, puts his headphones on and leaves the practice room. He enjoys the brief moment of sundown in the afternoon, that warm, golden hour that wraps everything in its mellow glow, and he usually aims to have a snack break around this time and doing a bit of theory homework before finally calling it a day.

Max closes the practice room door behind him, so deep in thought and immersed in his habit of picking a song to play on his phone (it’s an older phone of his that he’s been using after breaking the newer one) that he doesn’t notice how he’s not alone in the corridor.

A sudden, familiar “excuse me!” behind his shoulder startles him so badly that he drops the identification tag used for locking the doors.

Max swirls around, alarmed, and meets a pair of amber eyes, almost golden, the exact warm color of those late afternoons that he loves so… Certainly a much gentler color than the light of a bicycle shelter on a rainy evening.

“Sorry,” Rei Kon says in his thickly accented English, “I didn’t mean to surprise you.” He appears startled in retaliation by the fact that he has startled Max, a deeply apologetic expression on his face.

“It’s okay.” Max drops the headphones down to his shoulders, then reaches down to pick the tag again, hoping that he’ll come up with something to say while facing the floor. He doesn’t.

Therefore he cuts right to the chase once he’s back up.

“Wait just a second,” he says and now takes off his backpack. He opens the zipper of the smaller pocket and takes out the red handkerchief, then hands it over to Rei. “I washed it, but you might want to rinse it again before using it. Since it was kinda gross, you know.”

Rei stares at the piece of cloth in surprise for a moment before accepting it. “Oh – yeah, uh, thank you. I didn’t really need it back but, thanks.” He doesn’t put the cloth away, only holds it in his hand and stares down at it, or perhaps past it at nothing in particular since he’s looking somehow disoriented, and Max quickly realizes that the violinist must have called out to him for some other reason. What, though, he can’t even begin to imagine.

“What is it?” Max decides to then ask to prompt Rei to continue talking. “Did you want the practice room?”

“No, I...” Rei breathes out a sigh, straightens his slightly slouched posture and sticks the handkerchief in his pocket before he speaks again. “I came here to talk to you, actually.”

“Me? Yes?” Max’s eyebrows arch in surprise.

“About the competition,” Rei continues with a stutter. “I know we don’t really know each other, but I – well, I’d like to ask for a favor.” He moves some of the long hair behind an ear with his free hand – the other is holding a violin case – darting awkward glances between Max and the floor and then Max again, and the floor and Max and the floor.

_Pretty but not conceited,_ Max is delighted to take note of Rei’s nervousness; it makes himself feel significantly less stupid for being so awkward in front of him.

“If it’s something I can help with, sure,” Max says and flashes a friendly smile.

Rei gives him a small nod. “You can. Actually… you’re the only one who can.”

And Max doesn’t even have the time to voice his confusion when Rei suddenly bends forward and is bowing at him, and despite having spent only a marginal period of his life in Japan, Max knows that an angle that low is an extreme expression of humility.

“Please,” Rei says flat-out to the tips of Max’s shoes, “could you please become my accompanist?”


	8. The accompanist

“And you said _yes?_ ”

Takao stares at Max with a frown so deep that it makes his incredulous face look distorted. His lunch sandwich is hanging in mid-air in his hand, forgotten.

“Of course I said yes.” Max’s tone is nonchalant; he pops the Kewpie mayonnaise bottle open to add another serving on his own lunch.

“But Max,” Manabu begins in a much more discreet yet still fairly quizzical tone, “didn’t you say earlier how you weren’t even interested in participating again?”

“Being an accompanist is totally different. It’s not me who’s participating in the competition; I’ll just be a prop in the background.” He’s speaking confidently in his usual cheerful manner, but the truthful answer is that his heart is still throbbing from nervous excitement when he thinks back to his conversation with Rei.

Max hardly believed his ears at first, of course. He thought that Rei had made a mistake, or was playing a prank on him – which made him instinctively check the practice room corridor left and right, as he expected to see Michael or Eddie or Steve snickering behind some corner at his gaping face – but no. This really was actually happening. And Rei was still bowing at him, his long hair slithering down his shoulder like a black snake.

“Me?” Max asked stupidly again. “Wait – first of all, are you saying that you don’t have an accompanist yet? And the first concert is next week?” But that couldn’t be right, it didn’t make any sense – Max had seen and heard with his own eyes and ears how a good bunch of his female peers at school had been talking about wanting to give it a shot becoming either Rei Kon’s or Kai Hiwatari’s accompanist, and he knew that many of them were actually talented pianists that neither of the popular guys had any reason to turn down.

When Rei lifted his head again, his cheeks were flushed with a rosy hue. His gaze was still directed somewhere around Max’s shoes.

“No... I mean yes. I mean – people have been asking me about it since day one, but... uh... well... How should I put this...? None of them felt right because – I had already made up my mind.”

And suddenly Rei locked eyes with Max, the coy demeanor gone, staring at him with magnetic intensity that pulled Max right in to those captivating amber-brown eyes.

“It’s just – I can’t imagine playing with anyone but you,” Rei said.

It must have been the most romantic thing that anyone’s ever said to Max.

It also left Max so dumbfounded that all he could do for a beat was stare at Rei with a stupid, gaping face once more, as if he hadn’t been doing that enough already by now. This entire scene was just so absurd. Max hadn’t even been aware that Rei had in any way noted that he was a pianist; he had been convinced that if Rei had been thinking about him at all, it couldn’t be anything but wondering if Max had a few screws loose or was a troublemaker at the BBA or something of the sort.

“I’ll do it,” Max then heard himself saying; the words came out of his mouth before he’d formed a coherent thought about it.

But when his words had been followed by Rei’s stern expression breaking down into a relieved exhale and a smile of gratitude filled with genuine delight and satisfaction, Max knew that he wouldn’t at all regret this choice. Every inch of him had already fallen for this insanely good-looking treat of a man.

“Soooo…” Takao stretches the word, pulling Max back to the present moment from his rosy memories of yesterday. “Why exactly did this Mister Perfect Disney Prince want _you_ as his accompanist?”

Max rubs his hands together, a pleased, almost smug smile on his lips. “He saw the qualifiers and was totally blown away by my performance. He said he couldn’t believe I didn’t qualify, and then the thought of me as his accompanist haunted him for a whole week and wouldn’t leave him alone. His own words.” To be exact, Rei told this to Max later that same day, at the campus coffee shop where they agreed to meet each other to discuss how they’d go about this brand new arrangement. (Max isn’t saying that it felt a whole lot like a first date, but it did feel a whole lot like a first date.)

“And why did he wait until _one week before the first concert_ to ask you?” asks Manabu, the scorn obvious in his voice.

“Apparently he did try to get in contact with me, but the first weeks have just been so insane and he’s constantly harassed by people for attention, plus he didn’t know how to find me until he saw the practice room reservation table. But to tell you the truth...” Max leans in a bit closer to Takao and Manabu, bringing a secretive hand in front of his smiling mouth. “I got the feeling that he’s a bit socially awkward. Gets flustered easily.”

“That’s not the picture I got of him,” Manabu mumbles. “He’s always surrounded by people when I catch a glimpse of him. Very flirty with girls.”

“Maybe he’s comfortable around gals but not with guys,” Takao proposes, his mouth full of half-chewed sandwich.

“I guess that’s possible,” Manabu admits and momentarily spaces out during a lull in their conversation, staring off into the distance as if thoroughly contemplating the concept of a guy not losing his marbles around girls like he himself does every single time. (Max has witnessed this happen; for whatever reason Manabu seems to have the hots for Emily, one of the PPB students who wish Max dead for being Judy’s son.)

Max, in the meanwhile, feels as if he’s been floating a few inches off the ground ever since yesterday. He never considered the possibility of accompanying someone in the competition before, but now that he’s agreed to do it, he’s realized that it’s exactly the sort of arrangement that he wants. The result of his SWOT analysis of the competition was that the biggest pros were skipping regular practice for a good reason and getting to play selections of his own choice in front of a live audience, on a regular basis, outside course-assigned pieces and ensembles, while the biggest cons were constant stress brought by the fast-paced concert schedule and going through another traumatizing experience of unwanted attention that left him emotionally scarred for life.

Still, he’s made his choice. Playing the accompaniment means not choosing the pieces himself, but this doesn’t bother Max. He’s thrilled about the prospect of getting to walk onto the stage and playing for a large audience in the concert hall after all – without being the sole center of attention, both positive and negative. His role would be crucial, yet the real limelight would be on Rei and his violin. It’s almost all the pros of the competition without any of the cons.

And best of all, he would get to spend time alone with Rei, practicing their joint performance as often as their schedules permitted.

Needless to say, they’re now pressed for time from the get-go due to the schedule, which was another reason for their decision to meet up at the campus coffee shop – the Humming Bird – for a more in-depth conversation. Max won’t have a whole lot of time to practice the accompaniment part of whatever violin piece Rei chooses for the first round of the competition, and he’s actually never before accompanied someone else’s solo like this, but Max is confident enough in his piano skills that, during the couple of hours between leaving the practice room and getting out again to meet Rei (which he may have used to do his hair and change his clothes to something more laid-back that better fit a first date), he was steeling himself for the possibility that he’ll need to learn a fairly complex accompaniment piece in just a week’s time.

On the other hand, Max was very curious to hear what kind of song Rei would be choosing for the first round of the competition. Each of the rounds had a theme that the contestants were free to interpret in a way of their choosing, although some interpretations were certainly more popular with the judges than others, so it often paid off to play it smart when picking songs to play. Since almost all the approved qualifier pieces had been extremely technical, Max was expecting Rei to be choosing something hardcore for the violin throughout the actual competition – such as, who was that dude with the nightmarishly difficult compositions again – Paganini? Something of the sort. And what would the piano part be like, then? Max was both anxious and excited to find out.

And then he brought it up while they were sitting opposite each other in the dimly lit Humming Bird, and Rei sported a very small and very soft smile and moved some of his long hair behind his ear again (which Max quickly learned to be a gesture of bashfulness) and said after a pause:

“Well, the first theme is ‘the beginning’, so I thought… I’d like to play Pachelbel’s _Canon_.”

This piece of information caused Max’s smiling lips to curl down and form a tight, straight line. He lifted his brow and expected Rei to somehow signal that he was only joking.

But he wasn’t.

“It’s the song that made me pursue the violin seriously,” Rei explained. “I had lost my motivation for a very long time, and then one day I heard that song in passing, and… well. It was a beginning of sorts for me – and we’ll be able to fit the violin and piano parts together within a week, which is a plus.”

That was most definitely true. Pachelbel’s _Canon in D_ ’s piano accompaniment part was famous – or rather, notorious – for being so amazingly boring that it tempted pianists to fall asleep while sitting up.

However, Max knew that this was what he signed up for when he agreed to become an accompanist. This wasn’t about him and what he wanted to play; this was Rei’s competition, and if he was confident enough to play _Canon_ on that stage, then Max had no say in it whatsoever.

“And maybe you can spice it up a little,” Rei did then add quickly. “Make the piano part a bit more exciting.”

“That I can definitely do,” Max said and smiled.

And that smile hasn’t faded ever since.

“Well, I’m happy for you and all,” Takao says and tosses the empty sandwich wrapper in the closest bin. “Can’t believe you’ll be playing alongside that gigolo, though. Let’s hope he’s not a jerk.”

“You’re so quick to judge people,” Manabu huffs and pokes Takao with his elbow. “I’m sure he’s not that bad.”

Max knows Takao well enough to be able to tell that he’s just goofing around, so he only chuckles in response. Max isn’t worried in the slightest whether Rei is a pleasing person to work together with or not.

It’s the competition itself that’s stirring just the slightest fear in the pit of Max’s stomach, underneath all that excited flutter of butterflies. He has no intention of voicing that concern to the guys, though; he hasn’t told them the truth of what went down almost a year ago during the competition. Takao and Manabu are good friends to Max – have been ever since he started attending the BBA and they discovered each other as the only Japanese freshmen in their year – but still on that slightly shallow level of friendship where he isn’t quite comfortable with spilling all his darkest secrets. Besides, talking to other guys about such things is not really a thing that men do.

Therefore, even now, the only person who knows all about that final concert night is Mao.


	9. Mao

Max met Mao in middle school, back when he moved to New York again with his father after a few years of living in Japan. She had been the only other Asian kid in his class, a cutesy yet surprisingly sulky pink-haired girl who sat all alone in the back row, obviously a victim of the alienating racism casually practiced by all the other girls. Her Chinese family had rather abruptly decided to move to the other side of the planet because of some job-related offer that her father had received, and the move had obviously been fairly mentally taxing to her. Even when someone did try to approach her, she was moody and snappy in her responses, and since she didn’t speak any English, this all quickly made the rest of the class avoid her and leave her alone.

Except for Max. He knew exactly what it was like to not fit in, the painful humiliation of being aware of just how different one was from everyone else. He didn’t speak a word of either Mandarin or Cantonese – whichever was her native language, he didn’t know – but knew that Japanese kanji originated from China, which logically thinking meant that she’d be able to understand some of it if he wrote to her in Japanese. And that’s exactly what he decided to do. He sat in front of her in class and started passing notes scribbled in Japanese to her.

Of course she didn’t understand much any of it, only individual words or parts of words, and she had no idea why this strange boy was bombarding her with random scraps of paper that she could just barely identify as attempts of introducing himself.

But she did find him intriguing for this behavior. This was the very slow beginning of their friendship.

Gradually Mao began to learn English and was able to actually communicate with Max. His eminent lack of any romantic interest in her, despite them being a boy and a girl, was so refreshing to her that it made her appreciate Max’s fun and carefree personality all the more. They both were impulsive and fun-loving yet also observant and intelligent; Mao was the tough tomboy kind and Max was a soft and kind boy, yet they managed to complement each other perfectly. In a couple of months, they had become close friends; and by the end of high school they were inseparable.

Ironically enough, though, that was the point of their separation. Mao decided to do a gap year and focus on working a couple of random jobs, to get a bit ahead with paying for her own college tuition; and Max began to attend the BBA which now consumed the majority of his time, leaving him very few hours a week to spare to see Mao. Therefore their main form of communication within last year had been WhatsApp and occasional video calls. They did go out for coffee or shopping at least a couple of times each month to nurture their friendship, but it was a far cry from their days of being as thick as thieves.

And during the past few weeks, they haven't done even that much. Mao has taken a break from her job and gone on a surfing trip to Florida, and Max hasn’t seen her in a longer while now. The constant stream of beach photos flooding into his notifications make sure that she’ll stay fresh in his mind, though; she knows that the pictures make Max jealous, and that’s exactly why she keeps sending them.

Max hasn’t really figured out yet how to break the news about the competition to Mao. He can already tell that her reaction won’t be even half as favorable as the guys’. How is he going to explain it to her, even? “Yes, the competition left me deeply traumatized last time, but consider: that violinist is really hot”?

It wouldn’t be the first time of Mao judging Max for making poor decisions just because he couldn’t say no to attractive guys; a year ago they had a heated argument about Rick, mostly due to Mao being so fiercely protective over Max.

He quietly decides to tell her a bit later, once she’s back home and things have calmed down in general. It’s technically not lying to simply leave a few details of his life out when messaging her… right?


	10. Canon

Max doesn’t recall ever thinking much anything about Pachelbel’s _Canon_ ; it’s a staple of a song, overused in commercials and played in probably a hundred weddings every day in some part of the world.

But the human mind works in funny ways, and when he returns to his dorm room and plays a rendition of the piece for violin and piano on his old phone, really actually sits down to listen to this ages old composition with thought and care, it now strikes a whole new chord inside him. The feeling that it blossoms in his chest is similar to that of going back to watch a film he’s seen as a child – in the way that everything about it is so familiar yet new in his adult ears, the point of view so different now that it seems like a different thing entirely. _Canon_ has warm colors – the colors of a fading summer day. The image that it builds around Max is a field of grass in a sunset, serene and just slightly bittersweet.

Max isn’t sure if Rei is being an absolute dimwit picking something like this for the BBA music competition, or if there’s actually some hidden genius in it. The innocence of the choice is both amusing and charming to Max. _This is a song that Rei considers special. Here’s something that I know is close to his heart._

Max wants to know more about him. Rei’s handsome appearance isn't the only thing about him that intrigues Max; it's the mystery of his character, the apparent duality of this no-name violinist that attracts him so.

They have decided to do their joint practice sessions in the room that Max always uses. The following Tuesday is their first time playing there together.

It’s a bit weird for Max to see Rei Kon step into the room that has been Max’s own little sanctuary on campus for the past year. He’s so used to being all alone and now the school’s most popular guy is suddenly there with him, sharing that space, picking the snow white violin out of its case after politely greeting him in Japanese. (They settled on speaking Japanese with each other the day before, as Rei has a better grasp of it than English.)

“That violin,” Max says as Rei reaches for a block of rosin to rub his bow with, “is so unique – I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“It _is_ unique,” Rei confirms, handling the delicate instrument with ease that speaks for years of experience. “I call it Bai Hu, or Byakko.”

“Like the White Tiger?” _That’s so damn cute, what the Hell._ “Was it custom-made for you?”

There’s a brief, cool pause before Rei replies, busying himself with the rosin instead.

“Kind of,” he finally says dismissively. Then, as if to change the subject: “Should I play through the piece once first? You can follow with the piano if you’d like and build on modifying it from there.”

“Sounds good to me.” It’s a simple piece, after all.

However, as soon as Rei is done tuning the violin, brings it on his shoulder and begins to play, Max forgets all about following along with the piano. Rei has already made his own arrangement of _Canon in D_ and poured his heart and soul into replicating the piece that’s so personal to him. He starts off deliberately softly, playing the beginning part in a quiet, gliding way that then gradually begins to pick up gusto as the melody progresses…

And Max cannot tear his eyes off Rei while he’s immersed in the violin. He’s mesmerizing to watch, his expression so solemn and serious as he engages with the song, and Max is once again overcome with that sense of elegance and radiance that’s already made such a lasting impact on him several times before – although he didn’t earlier connect the dots with the radiance he sensed through the low quality YouTube video and the glow of that saint-like being who appeared out of the rain to help him that night several weeks ago.

But there’s something else about this brief performance that sticks with Max. When he listened to a recording of _Canon_ earlier, its tone was warm like the setting summer sun to him; but as Rei now plays it, the colors are completely different. Max sees blues and teals and grays, there’s a drape of melancholy cloaking the inherently heartwarming piece.

When Rei lifts the bow off the chords, it’s like waking up from a blue dream. As their eyes meet, Max blinks and is brought back to the present, back to the piano bench he’s been sitting on, staring at Rei.

This process wouldn’t be as straightforward as Max has been expecting after all.

A couple of hours later, during which they do make significant progress (but, during which, Max also realizes that he has a thing or a few to learn about playing the accompaniment part for a violin), they step out of the practice room and Max attempts to invite Rei for tea afterwards. This time, however, Rei turns the invitation down due to having so many things to do still. Then Max finds himself staring at the long braid that dances after Rei as he disappears down the practice wing corridor.

_I wonder_ , Max thinks as he lifts his silver headphones over his ears, _what it is that makes his violin sound so sad all the time._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pachelbel's canon (for violin and piano): <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNSstBrdfDE>


	11. Family

“Don’t you think he seems way too perfect?” Takao asks during their shared lunch break later that week. “Like, there’s no way he doesn’t actually have some serious skeletons in his closet.”

“And there’s no such thing as a perfect human being,” Max replies. Then he grins. “But some people certainly come a bit closer than others.”

Max doesn’t blame his friends for being slightly on edge about Rei; Max hasn’t been talking about much anything but him for the past several days, being the passionate kind who wants to share his excitement over things with others. It’s the first time during the trio’s acquaintance, though, that Max is openly this obsessed with someone.

“I must say I slightly agree with Takao here,” says the reserved and good-mannered Manabu, always diplomatic with his words. “You don’t know this person at all, so try not to have unrealistic expectations of him, Max.”

“It’s touching how you’re more concerned about my personal relationships than my own mother.”

“Speaking of your mother, what are her thoughts on you being an accompanist in the competition?”

“Well, she’s actually on the same boat with you guys.” Judy’s reaction surprised Max, who had expected her to be glad about him taking part in the competition in some form after all; instead, she accused him for poor judgment because Rei was nothing but a no-name violinist from China that Daitenji picked off the streets of Japan, like a stray cat.

Max doesn’t give a damn about her opinion, though.

“That woman’s not happy with anything, ever, is she?” Takao says, never hiding the fact that he doesn’t exactly like Max’s classist, elitist mother either. “Don’t lump me together with her. All I’m saying is that this Kon Rei is probably not the Disney prince everyone’s taking him as, and you sound like you’ve fallen in love with him big time based on first impressions, so maybe slow down a little.”

“I think it’s a lovely trait to have,” Manabu then adds, “having such a big heart.”

“I promise I’ll just stick to my job as his accompanist,” Max declares through a big smile. _For now._

* * *

Since Rei is busy with some extra activities related to the competition that Friday, Max decides to skip practice altogether and instead go see Mao who has finally returned from Florida.

Like Asian kids often do, she still lives in her parents’ apartment – the same one they moved to all those years ago and hence has also become very familiar to Max who used to visit the Chens fairly often before enrolling in the BBA. It's a modest apartment in an uninteresting apartment building, in a lower middle-class neighborhood with many other immigrant families from Asia.

“Come here, you cute beast!” Mao greets him with an enthusiastic hug after opening the door to him.

“Nice tan you got there.”

“Thanks. I made it myself.”

Max automatically makes his way to Mao’s room while she heads over to the kitchen to fetch them some snacks and drinks. Her parents aren’t home, which Max is low-key grateful for; they’re a very sweet old Chinese couple, and he does like them just fine in general, but they clearly have no concept of a man and a woman only being friends and have for the past six years been treating Max as a future son-in-law. Max has never been thrilled about this.

Mao’s bedroom is the same as always as Max scans all the familiar décor and furniture that he hasn't seen in a while with his eyes: lots of whites and pinks, several fluffy pillows and an assortment of cute, stuffed cat toys (her pride and joy is an enormous pink lynx, it guards over the rest on a small shelf above her bed); the small couch with star-shaped cushions on it, the bedside table with a somewhat dead-looking plant on it (maybe Mao’s parents forgot to water it while she was gone) and a traditional cabinet that has an entire shelf full of photos, both old and new, of Mao’s family and friends, including a few with Max himself in them. There are a couple of new pictures, undoubtedly from the newest trip, and he decides to take a quick look before sitting down by a low table in the middle of the room that they always spend time at.

The new photos haven’t been framed yet, Mao has set them standing against one of the older pictures on the shelf. After checking the pictures of Mao on the beach with her brand new surfing board and some blue-haired friend of hers, both posing at the camera, Max’s eyes inevitably fall on the old picture frame that was hidden behind the new photos… and his heart skips a beat.

The picture he’s looking at, as well as the one right behind it, crammed into the shelf that can hardly fit any more pictures at this point, features Mao’s family from the time she still lived in China; judging from how small she looks, the photo must be at least ten years old, maybe more. They’re standing in front of a traditional house, most likely the one they used to live in, all barefoot and holding hands on each others’ shoulders: Mao’s mother, father, older brother, then Mao herself… and one more person on her other side, a boy of approximately her brother’s height and age, or maybe a bit younger.

His hand suddenly shaking from inexplicable apprehension, Max reaches for the other picture standing behind this one, half-hidden from view. The other picture only features the three children together, their facial features much easier to tell apart in this photo. All three have long hair tied on a ponytail, and all three have the same sharp features; the other boy, the one that’s not Mao’s brother, is wearing a red bandana with a yinyang pattern on it on his head.

Max’s brain is now racing at breakneck speed, raking through his memory to remember what Mao has told him about these pictures approximately a century ago. A cousin… yes, he remembers it, Mao told him about her cousin that used to live with them in China… and broke her heart by moving to a big city to attend a better middle school elsewhere. He had been Mao’s childhood crush. How could Max have forgotten? It's all coming back to him now, Mao's stories about the cousin whose departure had been the greatest tragedy of her teenage life, up to the point when her family moved to New York anyway.

Max takes a couple of steps backwards, away from the cabinet, and slumps down by the tea table feeling like a deflated balloon. What kind of fucked-up coincidence is this? He has literally come to see Mao to tell her about the competition and Rei; now he’s suddenly trying to figure out this puzzle presented in front of him and no longer knows if he should say anything at all about him. Max remembers Mao mentioning that the cousin hasn’t contacted her family in years – that he pretty much disappeared off the surface of Earth. Knowing Mao (and Max does know her very, very well), she would have told him if there suddenly was some news about her long-lost cousin… which most likely meant that Rei hasn’t told the Chens that he’s in New York.

Moreover, now that he remembers that she used to like Rei, it feels nothing short of extremely damn weird to tell her that, _oh you know what? I kind of want to sleep with your childhood sweetheart—_

Mao enters the room with a cute little tray, carrying two glasses of iced tea and sweet snacks. “I just randomly grabbed some of mom’s stuff. Couldn’t find those cookies you like, sadly.”

Looking at her, Max can only wonder how he failed to see the resemblance between Rei and Mao all this time, dismissing the fact that they were both of Chinese origin. The BBA is full of students from all over the world, so it never even remotely crossed Max’s mind that Rei and Mao could be related in any way.

What a perverse thing this turned out to be. Max has no problem admitting that he finds Mao plenty attractive – while having been aware for six years already that crossing the line with her would without doubt put their friendship in peril, which he obviously doesn’t want – but to fall head first for her cousin who happens to look exactly like her is a new kind of low for him.

And now Max also finds himself treading some sort of family drama of long-lost cousins that he shouldn’t have anything to do with.

“Are you okay?” Mao asks with a frown. “Something wrong?”

Max shakes his head and reaches down to take one of the meringues that Mao has brought on a plate. “No… Or, well… A bit nervous about telling you the news.”

“What news? What happened? Don’t tell me you got in trouble again!”

“Let’s say it’s up to you do decide if it counts as trouble or not.”

Max tells her a much summarized version of the last couple of weeks, with no direct mention of her cousin being the violinist in case. It’s not like he’s lying – he didn’t even know that they’re related until a couple of minutes ago. He just conveniently leaves his name and nationality out of the story, only saying that Headmaster Daitenji brought him from Japan.

Mao has crossed her arms, staring at him intently with her mouth hanging just slightly open.

“I know what you’re about to say,” he counters her before she even says anything and throws his hands in the air.

She huffs. “And I don’t think I really have the right to say anything. It’s your life and your decisions, Max. But… just be careful, okay? I don’t want to see you hurt again, you know.”

“I promise I’ll stay out of trouble this time.”

While saying this, though, Max cannot stop thinking that he’s already got himself into some kind of trouble by ending up in the middle of a family drama from a decade ago.


	12. The beginning

As their rendition of Pachelbel’s _Canon_ is gradually being perfected – the timeless classic turning into a unique, contemporary take that made Max think of an episode in one of those cooking competition shows where someone had turned macaroni and cheese into a fine dining dish –, the mystery of Rei’s past and actual identity is also gradually filling Max’s thoughts. And the more it did, the more it’s starting to bother him, or rather than bothering, it's _teasing_ him, tantalizing him, like an itch he was dying to scratch but couldn't reach.

They do talk about themselves to each other – a little, at least, every time they meet up for practice. However, Max quickly notices a pattern of Rei habitually avoiding talking about his life before meeting Daitenji. Max finds himself in the strange position of fishing for specific facts that he already knows but is not supposed to know about Rei. He’s beyond curious to know what had made Rei leave his family completely behind at the age of thirteen, why he never went back or even contacted his relatives again.

But Max repeatedly fails to steer their brief conversations in that direction. What he does figure out from what little Rei tells him, though, is that he's been extremely independent from young age and already done some hardcore traveling around the Eastern and Southern parts of the Asian continent – and that apart from the violin, his other great passion is food. Of course, none of this means that Rei is necessarily _hiding_ things. After all, he has no obligation to spill his entire life story to his pianist who is a complete stranger to him (and, not to mention, whom he first met drunk and bleeding in a bicycle shelter).

Quite literally, the 'complete stranger' part isn't even an exaggeration in Rei's case for once. It’s one of the things that, in the end, makes Max feel so comfortable and charmed to be around Rei: he’s about the only person in the world who doesn’t seem to care at all that Max is Judy Tate’s son. Rei didn’t single him out because of her, but because he was genuinely impressed by his qualifier performance and saw his talent in it. It makes Max feel special in a way he, frankly, has never experienced before – and that’s no small feat considering how Judy has raised Max to feel special, for being her son and a piano prodigy in her footsteps.

It’s exactly what Max has always craved: being considered special for being himself.

And then, while Max is preoccupied mulling over this entire scenario, his clashing sentiments of being both confused and captivated by Rei, the night of the first competition concert is suddenly upon them.

The music competition comprises five rounds total, each of which has a different theme. The five judges, independent and impartial to each other, all rate the performances with points from 1 to 10 and give a short commentary to support the score; winners of individual rounds receive small prizes, usually some additional boost in music magazines and such, and the contestant with the most points after the final concert is the overall winner. The performances are rated immediately on the spot and the round’s winner is revealed once all six contestants have performed their pieces.

The concerts of rounds one to four are held in the BBA's own concert hall on campus, and it’s there, in the green room spaces behind the stage, that all the contestants are gathered along with their accompanists for the first time that fall. In other words, it’s finally revealed to all other contestants and their pianists that Rei’s accompanist is Max.

Max can already tell that this is about to become the next thorn in his flesh, that all Hell is likely to break loose at school again for this.

The feeling of contempt is mutual as he discovers that Rick’s accompanist is, for whatever reason, nobody else but Michael Summers, Judy’s pet student number one who shoved Max’s head against the concrete wall just a few weeks ago. (Michael doesn’t seem surprised to see him, however, and Max has an unpleasant hunch that Judy has already gossiped about it to the PPB. Thankfully the competition accompanists don’t include any other members of her personal herd.)

Regardless, Max cannot help feeling just a little smug as he walks in by Rei’s side, knowing full well how much attention is showered toward Rei – and how absolutely dazzling he is in his beautiful suit and with his long, braided hair that swings against his tall back, while Max himself is by far the one with the best-known name out of the bunch now gathered in the green room, all eyes on them as they enter the building and then the concert hall together.

Their turn is to perform third that night, and the chaos that ensues from the announcement of _Canon in D_ and the two of them walking onto the stage is one of those moments that are considered legendary from the very second they happen. Rei’s status as a forerunner combined with this absolutely nonsensical choice of a song, the audience erupting in murmurs as they realize that his accompanist is Max Mizuhara, and of course, the cherry on the cake: the performance itself, their own version of _Canon_ cultivated to perfection and performed with Max’s immersed dedication and the fantasy of Rei’s white violin that bleeds its bittersweet, untarnished melancholy all over the stage and the entire hall, leaving everyone in stunned silence in its wake.

It’s a very strange performance, one that people will remember for a long time.

Max is certain that he, too, will always remember it. The joy and warmth that flicker inside his chest as he gets up to the stage in Rei’s support for the first time, so proud to be there by his side; the very first time of Max playing the piano in front of an audience while pouring his heart and soul toward someone else’s performance, rather than his own.

It was magical. During that short yet sweet time spent on that stage, Max felt himself become part of something larger than simply the world inside his own little head – an invisible bond tying Rei and him together with the ribbons of the staves.


	13. Kai

The points that Rei and Max received on the first round were not stellar. Only one of the five judges was crazy about their _Canon_ , praising it as unique and bold; according to the rest, they did not only choose an inappropriate selection for the BBA competition but the piano accompaniment was also far too emphasized and aggressively penetrated the whole performance. Their score was 38.

The winner of the first round was Kai Hiwatari with astonishing 49 points, only one short from full 50. Ralf Jürgens landed second with 46.

There’s an obvious shift in the general opinion around the school following the first concert. It’s amazing how predictable people can be, their interest now latching onto the top three of the first round, namely Ralf and Boris in addition to the already popular Kai. (None of the three enjoy attention, which leaves a big handful of fangirls very frustrated.)

All the hubbub surrounding numbers and other people’s opinions is nothing but background noise to Max. He walks with a light step, through the corridors filled with the flood of gossip and eyes on his back, determinedly unconcerned with all of it, headphones over his ears so he doesn’t need to hear what people spout at him.

“Looks like you’re not worried about getting your ass handed to you by some new kid,” Takao comments as Max dances over to him and Manabu the following day. By “new kid” he’s referring to Kai’s accompanist, a first-year piano major named Brooklyn that nobody has ever heard of before whatsoever.

A dreamy smile on his face and a dreamy haze in his voice, Max says in response: “I think I’m in love with him.”

“What, the new kid?”

“What do you think, genius? Rei, obviously.”

The magnetic pull that Max has been feeling toward Rei reached its peak while they played on stage together, and Max hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since. A ghost of Rei’s melody now follows him everywhere, this haunting euphoria something much stronger than mere physical attraction, it’s nothing like Max has ever felt for anybody else before.

“Okay, alright,” Takao says and clearly keeps himself from speaking his honest mind. “You do you, Max.”

* * *

Each of the competition rounds is followed by a formal dinner event for all the participants, a sort of a celebration for their hard work and a breather before they all busy themselves again with the next round’s selections. What’s special about these dinners is that all the accompanists are also welcome to join, which is generally not the case with competition-related events. Max isn’t sure if he actually wants to be there, but he cannot resist the allure of attending a formal event as Rei’s partner. Therefore he finds himself in a restaurant reserved for the event on the Friday following the first concert.

In the more relaxed atmosphere, not defined by the nervous energy of competing and everyone getting ready to perform on stage, Max is able to take a proper look at all the contestants for the first time, all the while thinking back to the things that the ever-so-informed Manabu has reported to him.

Hiromi Tachibana is by far the nicest out of the other contestants and very easy for Max to approach due to them both being Japanese (after the mandatory “You don’t look like you’re half Japanese at all!” stage). She’s a hardworking, good-natured student with excellent grades, and the only gossip that Manabu has been able to track down to her is that she has a rather explosive temper and can be fierce when angered. Her accompanist is Salima, a Canadian and a fellow piano sophomore that Max is acquainted with but doesn’t exactly know, although he has nothing bad to say about her either. They’re overall pleasant people, although clearly not satisfied with being the only girls in the entire competition.

Ralf Jürgens is the only son of a famous German family, a whole lineage of successful musicians. Ralf is a brooding, always serious, always poised pianist and the only contestant who plays solo in the competition. He’s older than Max who therefore doesn’t exactly know him well, but ever since paying attention due to the competition, Max has noticed that Ralf always hangs out with three other juniors who are all from Europe and appear equally elitist. It’s obvious that they have their own private gentlemen’s’ club that nobody else is welcome to approach.

Similar yet nothing alike with those people, Boris Kuznetsov is a violin sophomore originally from Moscow and is usually seen with a small gang of other Russian students, one of which is his accompanist Yuriy Ivanov. They also mostly stick to their own group and keep up an effective social border by only speaking Russian with each other, although there has been some juicy gossip going around that Yuriy first wanted to accompany Kai Hiwatari in the competition. He obviously ended up sticking with his best mate Boris instead, but it has left Max in curious wonder over what sort of relationship Yuriy might have with the cellist.

Speaking of the devil, Kai Hiwatari is a strange entity, a bit of an enigma even considering the tidbits of information that Manabu was able to gather. Max has been intrigued by him from the moment he first laid eyes on him (what can he say – tall, robust and mysterious is totally his type) but doesn’t exactly know much about him. Manabu has confirmed through the grapevine that Kai used to take significant part in some gang activities before attending the BBA, but he’s mostly been a withdrawn loner at the school, which seems to suggest that he’s given up the rowdy habits of his teenage years. Kai’s family owns the Hiwatari Enterprise, one of the biggest presently existing Japanese companies, but Max doesn’t know how he’s ended up in New York instead. There’s also no indication of anyone else in his family being a musician instead of working for companies owned by the enterprise. Kai seems to be the black sheep of his family that has decided to take as much distance from the rest as possible.

Kai’s accompanist, Brooklyn, is at least as strange as the cellist. Manabu was able to discover that he’s also been scouted to the BBA as a special case, much like Rei: a regular piano student who caught the staff’s interest. Nothing certain is known about his background, but Manabu could fairly confidently say that Brooklyn doesn’t come from any important or famous family. Something about him is a bit off apart from his vague background as well; there’s something gloomy about this ginger-haired boy, something unnerving about the way he appears so dark and out of touch with everything around him. The success on the first round has already swept Brooklyn into the sea of abrupt popularity, and he and Kai arrive slightly late to the dinner event due to having been interviewed for some television program – and neither seem interested in any of this, Kai with his usual frown and Brooklyn with an absent-minded, humorless smile on his face.

And finally, there’s Rick whom Max is already closely acquainted with, having shared a dorm room with him for a year already. It was initially daunting to Max, being thrown in a shared room with a huge black guy right off the bat during his first step toward independence from his parents – but after a rough start, they had become rather… _intimate_ with each other.

Why Rick would ever choose to let a douchebag like Michael be his accompanist is utterly beyond Max, though. The two seem to get along well enough, so Max figures that they have some weird friendship going on; it’s not like Max has ever singled Michael out as one of the culprits for some of the black eyes and bleeding noses that he’s returned to their dorm with at the end of the day. Rick is a rowdy guy himself so he’s never blamed Max for not running away from a good fight, but Max has also never told Rick about the systematic terrorizing that he’s suffered through because of the PPB students. Perhaps he should tell him about it one of these days, now...

Max already knows that he won’t, though, as the thought passes through his mind. He’s never told about his hardships to anybody but Mao, and that’s not likely to change any time soon, if ever.

Deep in these thoughts about each of the contestants, Max lets his gaze wander from face to face, from one end of the long line of joined tables to the other, and startles when it meets the gaze of a pair of dark brown eyes in the process. He suddenly finds his eyes locked with those of Kai’s.

Max doesn’t even know why his reaction is to quickly avert his gaze down to the glass of aperitif in front of him, like a shy schoolgirl who’s caught a handsome guy staring. _I didn’t expect that. Why is he staring at me?_

And now Max is becoming increasingly aware of just how uncomfortable he is in this group. He’s most definitely not a shy or antisocial person, rather the opposite – Max is a cheerful social butterfly, known as the perky one in any group he’s part of, but in this company he’s having an extremely hard time becoming relaxed and opening his mouth to speak to anyone. He’s seated opposite Ralf who is most definitely not going to talk to him; on his left side is Boris who’s only interested in talking to Yuriy, the melodious syllables of Russian shooting off their tongues as a constant flood of nonsense in Max’s left ear; on his right side is Rei, but he’s engaged in a lively conversation with Salima, and their eager chatter reminds Max of the multiple times that Takao and Manabu have called Rei a flirty womanizer, a side of him that Max has yet to see himself as he only ever meets Rei in private to practice together. But true enough, Rei clearly hit it off immediately with the red-head two seats away from Max.

It’s so amazingly stupid to feel discouraged about this. It’s not like Max has in any way expressed his interest in Rei yet, apart from trying to ask him out a couple of times, and even then he’s been talking about going out for tea which hardly counts as flirting. And maybe Rei isn’t interested in guys in the first place – Max is aware that it’s the most likely option but the part of him that’s stuck in the honeymoon phase of their acquaintance doesn’t want to admit it, the part of him that has been feeling so special for having been chosen by Rei… the part that has been so enamored by that special bond between them these past couple of days.

“I’m gonna go to the bathroom,” Max mumbles and gets off the table that has suddenly started feeling like a prison with its tight row of chairs neck to neck. They haven’t even ordered the food yet, but he doesn’t care. It’s one of those moments that make Max wish he smoked, as this would have been the perfect, artistically angsty moment to go outside for a couple of minutes; but no, he makes his way to the men’s room for no real reason.

A moment later he’s staring at his own childish face in the long bathroom mirror, wondering if he should just leave. He could have gone home for the weekend to play with Charlotte. He could be playing the piano right now instead of holing up here like an idiot.

The bathroom door opens, and the person entering just has to be the one that Max least wants to see right now – or ever, to that matter. Now his eyes meet with Michael’s who’s wearing his usual shitty grin on his face while staring down at Max. His hands leisurely in his pockets, Michael doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to do any actual business in the bathroom either.

“What’s wrong?” Michael asks with a sneer. “Not feeling like the golden boy for once, _bocchan?_ ” (This is an insulting nickname originally used by Rick and then gracefully adopted by all of the PPB, the Japanese term for a young son of a rich family, in other words a deceivingly polite way of calling him a spoiled brat – habitually pronounced wrong by Michael, potentially on purpose.)

“Says the champ whose pair got the lowest score,” Max spits back. He’s sounding perfectly spiteful but has instinctively turned around, his back now facing the sinks and the mirror. He realizes that some primal part of his brain has instantly gone to alarm mode for being cornered in a bathroom, forcing a tremble down Max's limbs and up his tense neck.

Michael shrugs and takes a step forward. “Okay, tell me, just between us friends – or colleagues, whatever. Did you pick that Chink just to rub it on Mrs. Judy’s face? How did you do it, anyway, get past all the people that were pretty much lining up to get to play for that guy? Not that I understand what’s so good about that rat.”

For a beat or two, Max only stares at him. The anxiety swelling inside him is soon accompanied by red-hot rage that seeps through as Michael’s words sink in.

“No,” he growls under his breath and shakes his head. “It has nothing to do with my mom – nothing ever has, like I’ve told you racist thickheads about a thousand times. And Rei asked me, that’s all there is to it.” Then he adds: “And stop calling him names.”

Michael lets out a short, bark-like laugh.

“Right,” he says. “Don't you ever get tired of that? You know, it’s not sane to never allow yourself to look like the weasel that you are. Always so perfect, so pure, little _Maxie_ , aren’t you? I’d just wanna know how you get away with this stuff for once.”

“You’re delusional,” Max mutters and tries to will himself to move toward the door. His feet won’t move; they have taken root on the tiled floor, his hands now tightening around the sink behind him.

_Shit._

“You’ve seen yourself how thirsty that guy is,” Michael continues, taking another step closer to Max, “and you’re sincerely telling me that he chose _you_ over Emily and all the other gals fighting over him? ‘The hell did you do with those big blue puppy eyes of yours? Or maybe it was your mouth—”

The bathroom door opens again. The third person who enters the room is Kai Hiwatari. He remains at the door, holding it open with an outstretched arm while staring at the pair inside with that steady, icy cold look of his.

“What’s going on here?” he asks, his voice blunt, the kind that doesn’t carry any interest to actually know the answer to the question whatsoever. It’s more like a statement in tone.

Michael, who was well on his way to tower over Max, now takes a step back, obviously alarmed. This sudden distraction allows Max to snap out of his paralyzed state by the sink, and one second later he has dashed out of the bathroom.

“Nothing, I was just about to go.”

And as he passes Kai at the door and the taller boy removes his arm to make room for him, their eyes meet once more and Max has a strange feeling that Kai knows exactly what just happened – or rather, what was about to happen.

Could he really have known, though? Was it possible for Kai to know how Max and Michael’s relations were like? It feels extremely unlikely. And even then, why would he have come after them?

Max’s head is spinning a little as he returns to his seat, which is when he remembers his plans to leave. But he’s already back at the table – and more importantly, Rei now immediately turns to him, his voice full of concern.

“Are you okay? You look a bit unwell.”

“Uh. It’s nothing serious.” The temptation to tell the truth burns at Max’s throat; he wants to tell everyone that Michael is a bitter, delusional, manipulative asshole racist that won’t leave him alone; alas, it wouldn't suit the occasion. This is not the right time nor place.

It does please him to notice that Kai returns to the table with Michael nowhere in sight, though.


	14. The lark ascending

If Rei is bothered by the first round’s score, he at least doesn’t show it. He’s very mature about it, telling Max that he knew to expect it for choosing such a simple piece and that he doesn’t blame Max at all despite the judges completely tearing his accompaniment apart.

Max can, however, tell from Rei’s avoidant eyes and mannerisms (which he is always keenly observing) that the violinist isn't being completely honest.

“The second round’s theme is ‘Spread your wings’,” Rei tells him as they meet up for practice the day after the awkward dinner event. It’s a Saturday and Max hasn’t made a reservation for the practice room, but the school is always quiet over the weekends.

Rei takes out his phone (Max takes note that it’s brand new) and a pair of earphones which, to Max's surprise, Rei wants them to share.

“You already picked a piece?” Max says, recalling his own indecisiveness with each piece last year while he makes room for Rei to sit next to him on the piano bench. There's nothing else in the room, apart from the floor, that they both could comfortably sit on.

“Sure did. It’s _The Lark Ascending_ by Vaughan Williams, a British composer.”

So they sit down side by side, and Rei presses play on the song on his phone, and they listen to the fourteen-minute piece in silence. It’s another very emotional song; to Max, it sounds – no, feels like a winter sky, pale and blue and from the lark’s point of view as it dives through the air past and between trees covered in snow in a countryside landscape.

Despite the song painting a scene of winter on his mind's canvas, Max is enveloped in the warmth of being close enough to Rei to feel his calm breathing next to him. Now that they’re together in the safety of the practice room again, it’s very difficult for Max to relate to those feelings of frustration that seized him the night before; as they are now, Max can’t imagine anything coming between them, and even if something did, it wouldn't change how Max feels about him. The sentimental song brimming with delicate beauty in his right ear is such a perfect analogy to how he perceives Rei's serene existence next to him.

“If the judges aren’t going to love this,” Max then says once they’re done listening, “I’m going to eat an entire grand piano.”

Rei laughs at this notion but doesn’t say anything. He studies Max with his eyes for a moment before getting up to his feet and leaving Max’s side by the piano.

“Think you can use the score attached to the description?” he asks.

“Of course. I can do the first part by ear, too – and possibly the rest.”

And so they get started with the piece. Even though he ought to be used to watching Rei play the violin already, Max still finds it impressive how effortlessly he handles the instrument and casts such clear and precise sounds by making the bow dance across the four chords; and how good that pearl-colored violin looks as it rests on Rei’s shoulder, it really looks like it was made for him.

When they’re done some time later and Max begins to pack up his things as usual, Rei suddenly speaks up in that same insecure tone that was present in his voice back when he startled Max by the practice room's door all those days ago.

“Um… You know… or rather, I hope you know – I really mean it when I say I don’t blame you for that first round.”

Max turns to look at him, eyebrows arched high.

“Yeah,” he says, “sure… I mean, I _am_ partially responsible for that—”

“You really aren’t. I’m the one taking part in the competition, and you’re still the only pianist I’m interested in having as my accompanist. I want you to know that, that’s all.” With that, Rei lifts up his violin case and marches out of the room. “See you later, Max.”

Max remains standing by the piano, staring after him in puzzled silence.

* * *

A possible explanation for Rei's behavior arrives to Max the following Monday, in the form of Manabu spilling the latest school gossip to him and Takao.

“Maybe you already noticed,” Manabu says warily, “but you’ve become extremely unpopular with all of Kon Rei’s fans for ruining his chances to win the first round – other people’s words, not mine.”

Max hasn’t, in fact, noticed. He’s already learned to simply shut his ears to everything that's going on around him at school, and becoming unpopular is nothing new to him.

“I don’t care, as long as they don’t get in my way.” And as long as things don’t escalate the way they did last year; he was devastated enough to have his own competition ruined, but now it was Rei who would suffer from it, and that may actually be even worse.

“Did you know that dude has his own private room at the dorms?” Takao then says, unwrapping his usual lunch sandwich. “Because he’s Headmaster Daitenji’s favorite. Heard he gets all kinda things from him. Damn, maybe I should go play the guitar on the streets so some rich dude could pick me up.”

“Haven’t you been taught to not go along with strange men who offer you stuff?”

“Apparently it pays off sometimes!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the lark ascending (for violin & piano): <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moTPTXBBX6Y>


	15. Keeping secrets

The more time goes by, the more Max is starting to believe that Rei simply isn’t aware that his relatives live in New York, even fairly close by. Mao still doesn’t mention her cousin when they meet up at her workplace – a burger chain restaurant – one evening when Max has a bit of spare time, which most likely means that she doesn't know about Rei yet, either.

This raises the question whether the morally sound thing to do would be to let the long-lost cousins know about each other’s presence… but how exactly? Max stumbled into this situation by accident, as an outsider, and he’s already neck-deep in pretending that he doesn’t know about their kinship. What if he, plain and simple, tells Mao the truth? Tell her that he didn’t intend to pretend or lie to her, but simply didn’t know what to do. Max hasn’t even had the time to put his thoughts in order about this all.

Worse still, when Mao comes over to his table, having finished up her shift, the first thing she says as she sits down opposite him is: “You have someone new, don’t you? I recognize that look.”

Max raises his eyes from the fries, shooting such an alarmed and downright scared look at his best friend that it earns a confused frown from her.

“What?” she adds.

“What look?” he asks in retaliation.

“Well! I don’t know how to describe it, but you always got this look like your head is up in the clouds when you’ve met some guy – or gal, but you rarely do.”

“I hate how well you know me,” Max mumbles and dips a fry in his mayonnaise fountain.

“Tell me! Are you seeing someone?”

“No,” he says quickly. “It’s nothing – not even worth telling about.”

“Oh, please.” Mao squints at Max, lowering her voice as if that would prompt him to speak the truth. “Did you get yourself in some kinda juicy situation? Is it a teacher?”

“Good Lord, no.”

“Is it Rick again, then? Is that why you don’t want to tell me?”

“No!”

“Why’re you being so secretive about it, then?”

“Because he’s…” Max swallows hard and stares down at the mayonnaise. What’s keeping him from just saying it? _He’s your cousin_ , it’s that easy. There’s something, some small thing deep inside Max that’s keeping him from saying it, some reason that’s nagging at him, telling him that it’s not a good idea to reveal Rei’s whereabouts to Mao behind his back. They haven’t ever talked about it, but somehow Max can tell by instinct that he shouldn’t stick his nose in this – that he’d do Rei a disservice by talking about his private affairs.

“Sorry, Mao,” he finally says. “It’s related to the competition and I don’t want to take any risks of things getting ugly – plus I’m being honest when I say nothing’s happened between us.” Admitting it so plainly is a bit painful, but there it is.

Mao is visibly disappointed. She lets out a deep sigh and rolls her eyes.

“I really don’t like that you’re back to that business, honestly,” she says then.

“I know. But only being an accompanist is nothing like the real deal. I’m not nearly as involved in stuff now. So – how about you, then? Got anybody in your radar?”

 _Smooth_ , Max thinks to himself as the subject turns to Mao, who immediately seizes the opportunity to start venting about her lacking love life.

* * *

Soon it’s Friday again, and this time Max does go back home to see his father and baby sister for a change. However, the tight concert schedule means that a significant chunk of the time he spends at home goes to holing up in the music room to practice his part of _The Lark Ascending_.

Even if Max has managed to avoid listening to people’s slander at school, he’s now subjected to plenty of it by his mother when nobody but the family is around to hear it. Judy is again unhinged with her criticism of both Max’s poor performance as an accompanist, saying that he’s only suited to be a soloist because his rightful place is being the center of attention on stage, and of Rei whom she clearly has no intention of changing her mind about.

“Alright,” says Max when this has gone on for several minutes over the dinner table, gets up and picks the excited Charlotte on his arms, “why don’t _we_ go over there to do something that’s more worthwhile than listening to our dear mother’s opinions?”

“Wordwhile!” Charlotte shrieks.

But as Max an hour later returns to the blessed silence of the music room, he finds himself mulling over the fact that Rei was personally scouted by the Headmaster. He was studying in Japan during his travels at the time, wasn’t he? It does sound a little peculiar that he abandoned his studies to agree to come along with some Japanese gentleman who happened to have a music school in New York.

 _Wait_ , Max then thinks and presses a focused finger on his forehead. There it is – that’s the nugget of information that’s been nagging at him for a while already. It wasn’t due to some random event that Rei was brought to the States – when Daitenji introduced Rei to Max at the school all those days ago, the Headmaster said that it had been Rei’s own wish to come to New York; Max is almost certain that the way Daitenji worded it was that he granted Rei’s wish by taking him along.

It could be coincidence. Or it could not. Either Rei had some other particular reason to want to come to New York, or—

 _But why, then_ , Max asks himself as he sits down in front of his mother's Steinway & Sons, _has he still not contacted his relatives, if it’s the very reason he came here for?_

He raises his hands over the monochrome keys, plays a couple of random scales.

 _I need to focus…_ But his thoughts are too scattered. Instead of going straight to practice, he decides to slip into the familiar comfort of his Milky Way Song as a warm-up.

In his current state of mind, however, the familiar has begun to take a new form, and when Max reaches the end of the B part of the song, his fingers grind to a halt and he leaves the ghost of the final A note to echo in the music room, his foot resting on the pedal, forgotten in place. He leans back and drops his hands in his lap.

It’s weird how strongly he is associating this composition with Rei all of a sudden. He didn’t even know him while creating it, yet the pieces are falling in place so naturally now and suddenly it’s completely obvious to Max that the song is linked to his feelings for the violinist. The melody no longer floats in the midst of the stars with no aim or purpose; instead, it zooms in to a very definite anchor point, and that point is Rei, so clear in Max’s mind at that very moment that it’s hard to believe he never noticed the missing element.

He never intended it to be a love song, but there it is now, plain as day – or night, as black as the night-color of his velvet hair.

 _I’m being ridiculous_ , Max then thinks, shaking his head. He rolls his shoulders back with a deep sigh. _Remember that you hardly even know him. Remember that he could be out there somewhere with some girl this very moment._ Actually, given how many times Max has heard about Rei having an abundance of girls to choose from, it’s unlikely that he doesn’t have a girlfriend by now.

Rei did say that other people’s insults aren’t enough for him to change his opinion on Max, but what about this? What would Rei think if he knew that Max was here daydreaming about him, building castles in the air and thinking about being in love with him, well on his way to dedicate a whole song to him?

It could be a bit much.

“Time to get back to business,” Max says out loud, firm, and stretches his fingers before bringing them back to the keys.

* * *

 _The Lark Ascending_ treats the two much better than the first round did. They nail the performance and receive high praise for its delicacy and overall mood; none of the judges have anything negative to say about the piano part this time. They score straight 9s and one 10, making their overall score 46 on the second round.

Max is content with the result, but even more so he’s happy to see the relief that blossoms on Rei’s face when the judges begin to announce the score. They’re now third on the scoreboard, one point behind Ralf Jürgens. Kai, on the other hand, gets almost full points once again and is now at 97, already over ten points ahead of everyone else, which is rather astonishing after two rounds of the competition. His cello is basically mopping the floors with the rest of the contestants.

Even so, Max cannot sense any particular hostility toward Kai from the others or their supporters, perhaps because of the intimidating air that hangs so thick over this ex-gang member… or perhaps because he hardly socializes with anybody, not giving them much to use against him. It’s almost sad, really. If Max had any time outside his own schedule and knew how to get in contact with the elusive cellist, he would have given befriending Kai a shot.

Since the second concert is on a Friday, they have their celebratory dinner party right after on the same night. It ends up being a much more pleasant event than the previous one; Max is in such high spirits that he feels more at ease being his own perky self, this time engaging in conversations with Hiromi, Salima, Rick and Rei instead of sulking in silence, which also keeps Michael from targeting him with his usual snide commentary.

Better still, Rei agrees to walk back to the campus with Max afterwards, for once not under the pressure to get anywhere on time, except his own bed. It’s already 10pm by the time they exit the restaurant.

“Not in a hurry to spend the night with somebody?” Max jests, posing this as a playful question while keeping a close eye on Rei’s reaction.

Rei gives him such a confused look that a wave of satisfaction already washes over Max before he even words an answer to the question. “Uhm, no.” Then Rei turns away from Max, his hair hiding his profile just as his cheeks gain the faintest hue of rosy red that’s already familiar to Max, much like all his other coy mannerisms.

 _He is so not the flirty type!_ Max thinks, _He’s way too sweet for that! Could it be that he doesn’t even realize how he behaves around girls who show interest in him?_

Suddenly encouraged by the thought, a little drunk on the joyful mood of the evening and feeling loose-lipped in general, Max carries on asking: “Got anybody special in mind, though? You’re maybe the most wanted guy in the entire school, you know. Whoever manages to reel you in is a lucky fellow.” He lets out a short, hopefully friendly laugh.

Rei hums a humorless “mmm” in response at first. Then – _there it is!_ – he awkwardly moves some of his long hair behind an ear.

“Do you really think so?” he asks, sounding skeptical.

“Yes!” Max says, plain and firm.

This is as far as their conversation goes; they’re interrupted by the honk of a car’s horn coming from behind. It’s Judy who has stopped her silver-gray Audi by the sidewalk. Behind her on the backseat is Charlotte, clearly insane with excitement and barely staying in the seatbelts at the sight of her older brother, waving a stuffed turtle toy at Max (or rather, banging it against the car ceiling).

“Hop in, Max,” Judy commands after opening the window a crack, “before this little monkey here jumps out of the car.”

“We were in the concerd!” Charlotte’s screams erupt from behind her. “ _Onii-tan!_ We were in the concerd!”

Max flashes an apologetic smile at Rei. “Looks like I gotta go. See you later – or you can text me about the third round, I don’t mind. Bye!”

And as he makes his way to the vacant side of the Audi’s backseat (preferring to sit with Charlotte rather than Judy), he feels just a little haunted by the troubled look on Rei’s face as he waves Max a goodbye, a look that keeps nagging at Max as they pull away and begin the 20-minute drive home.

_Maybe he doesn't take teasing very well…?_


	16. A confession

After another refreshing weekend of arguing with Judy, listening to Tarou arguing with Judy and having multiple play-concerts with Charlotte (in which she, rather than mimicking her brother’s performance, apparently wants to pretend that she’s Boris Kuznetsov out of all people and mocks his aggressive violin stunts very convincingly), Max is happily back in the BBA for the beginning of a new week as well as the third round of the competition. It turns out, however, that the final week of October has been packed so full of activities for the six contestants – a photo shoot for a major music magazine, an orientation day for the remaining three rounds, and a demonstration session for a local children’s conservatory that wants the contestants to assist its students – that Rei has no time to meet up with Max until Thursday.

It feels as if the universe itself is trying to pull Rei out of his reach and render his attempts to build a relationship between them useless. This is all surprisingly difficult to Max, who has next to no experience in romancing someone. It’s not at all the same as mere physical attraction that he's familiar with from all his previous relationships, he’s not used to being this concerned with what someone else might think of him in return, and this side of things makes him feel like a stranger to himself, a hint of unconventional self-doubt now creeping into his character. He doesn’t know what to do with himself if Rei doesn’t sense the same connection between them; it’s an oddly fragile feeling, as if something might burst inside him and kill him on the spot if Rei rejects him.

Max spends many lengthy minutes in the practice room spacing out behind the piano keys, deep-diving into his daydreams when he should instead be learning his part of Maurice Ravel’s _Tzigane_ , the third round’s selection that Rei has texted him about. _Tzigane_ is a dramatic and whimsical rhapsodic piece, not of the melancholic type that Rei has been playing so far in the competition. It’s going to give them some leeway to fool around more, but Max can already tell that this one will be more of an effort from his part compared to the previous weeks.

And yet, here he is spacing out instead. Somehow, in the absence of Rei’s violin, the piece keeps slipping away from Max’s fingers; he cannot quite get the handle of it, cannot properly bring focus to the image it creates.

After three aimless days like this, things are finally back on their usual track… or not quite. They meet up in the practice room as usual, but it quickly becomes evident to Max that something’s not quite right with Rei. His usual calm and collected act is off, he’s frazzled and makes more mistakes on the violin, a stark contrast to pretty much none before; Max catches him on more than one occasion staring off into the distance, dangling his white violin absent-mindedly off his shoulder, with a distant expression on his beautiful face.

Apparently Max isn't the only one who's having problems focusing this week. He chalks Rei’s behavior up to exhaustion, at first; it’s not that strange for him to be worn out after so many extra activities on top of regular classes. _Or perhaps all the stress is finally catching up to bite his ass._

When Rei is only more scatterbrained the following day and – for the first time since the beginning – proposes that they wrap things up early because he’s feeling unwell, Max starts to actually worry.

“Is something wrong?” he asks.

“… No…” The way Rei leaves the ambiguous reply hanging in the air very much signals the opposite to Max, as does the troubled look on his face. The avoidance is evident, however, and Max can already tell that insisting on the subject wouldn’t bear much fruit.

Therefore, while packing his things up, Max decides to change the topic entirely: “There’s the Halloween party tomorrow, have you thought of going?”

This earns him a more animated response from Rei, who turns to dart him a questioning look from the floor where he’s currently locking White Tiger the violin back to its velvet-covered cage. “Halloween? Oh… I forgot that Americans had such a holiday.”

“My _favorite_ holiday, mind you! Would you like to go together?” Rei certainly looks like he could use a break.

“Isn’t it a costume party?” he says, still uncertain. “I have nothing to wear…”

“That’s fine, I can paint your face if you’d like. I’m really good at it!”

“Really? Well, thank you – guess I could as well, then.” Max is relieved to see a small smile appear on Rei’s lips, the first one all week.

“The party starts at six,” Max says while checking the calendar on his phone, “so… it should be enough if you come to our dorm room half an hour earlier—”

“No,” Rei interrupts him so promptly and out of the blue that it gives Max a start. Then, with a less hostile tone, Rei repeats: “No – I’d prefer you to come to my dorm when you’re ready. Do you know where it is? Room number 505, in the West Hall.”

“Um, okay, that works – I can bring my stuff there.” It takes Max a moment to reel back from the surprise of Rei raising his voice at him so suddenly, and he waves the violinist off half-heartedly as Rei hurries out of the room a second later in a swish of impossibly long hair.

He really is acting strange. It’s hard to compare the calm, mature, reliable Rei to this fidgety space cadet who doesn’t know how to express himself properly.

 _It’s not because of me, is it?_ No, that seems unlikely…

* * *

 _West Hall, though._ And the fifth floor nevertheless.

At half past five on Saturday, Max is standing in the lobby of the West Hall building, the only one of the four auxiliary buildings of the BBA School of Music that Max has hardly ever entered – actually only once for something related to his mother because the staff has their lounge area in this extravagant building. Now he’s waiting for an elevator to come down and feels very much out of place in his cartoony demon costume (just a simple one; a pair of horns, a blood-red cloak over a black-and-red satin suit and some face paint, nothing fancy in his standards) and Max is a little glad that he’s come to fetch Rei on his own instead of taking his friends with him. If Takao was there and witnessed the place where Rei’s notorious one-person dorm room was, there would be no end to the remarks about him being the Headmaster’s favorite, sugared by him in every possible way – and the annoying part of it was that Takao would have been absolutely right saying so. The North Hall where Max and Rick’s room is located looks like a prison compared to the luxury of the building that Max has just entered, and the fifth floor here meant some actual views over the city and not just the delightful sight of someone else’s dirty window a few feet away… not to mention that there’s only a handful of students who are not sharing a room with someone else at the campus dorms, and Max is almost certain that all the rest of those solitaries are simply temporarily missing a roomie due to someone quitting in the middle of the semester or something of the sort. In other words, it is not an exaggeration at all to say that Rei _is_ getting the special treatment due to being Daitenji’s hand-picked favorite.

It could be a stressful position to be in, though, instead of being all roses and new phones all the time.

A moment later, Rei opens the door that says 505 on it in big brass numbers. He stops for a moment to stare at Max with a confused look.

“Wow,” he says, impressed. “You look incredible.”

Beaming at the compliment, Max steps into Rei’s dorm room. As expected, it’s double as spacious as Max and Rick’s two-person room; Rei has a large bed all to himself, and a couch and a bookshelf and a small kitchen compartment and, also just as Max suspected, a tall window with a view over some of the rooftops of New York City. At least the room is messy as blazing Hell, though, with clothes and dishes and take-away food bags lying all over the floor and every possible surface. The only things that Rei apparently cares to be pedantic about are his violin, the black case lying on its side on a cushion next to a toolkit for maintenance supplies, and his school uniform that’s sitting neatly folded at the end of his bed. (Max rarely sees Rei in anything but the formal attire of the school and is now overjoyed about a dark turtleneck sweater and a pair of jeans on the violinist, all so very tight-fitting that it’s not only extremely flattering to Rei’s lean figure but generously shows off the soft curves of Rei’s trained upper body, which is something that Max could have expected from a hardworking violinist but only now gets to actually see. For a fleeting moment before stepping into the room, he was tempted to pin Rei against the doorframe right there and then and perhaps forget all about the Halloween party downstairs… Oh well, maybe one day.)

They settle down on the floor and Max begins to work his face-painting magic on Rei. He’s not only brought the brushes and black-and-white paint with him to give half of Rei’s face a classic skull look, but also mascara and eyeliner in hopes of Rei giving him the green light to apply some of those on his eyes. Followed by a brief moment of prejudiced hesitation (Max was prepared for such; it’s the reaction he’d expect from any guy), Rei agrees to the suggestion, strictly as part of the Halloween look.

“Where have you learned to use make-up like that?” he asks, looking only slightly terrified as Max tilts his chin up and brings the small, hairy brush to his left eye.

“I’ve picked up all sorts of things from my best friend,” Max replies truthfully.

“Really? From Saien and Kinomiya?”

“ _Oh my God_ , no. My best friend is a girl – I’ve known her since middle school.” _Careful now…_

“Oh, wow.” It’s clear that Rei is genuinely surprised by this, but to Max’s relief, he doesn’t pursue the topic any further and instead adds: “Your little sister is going to be overjoyed about having a brother like you when she’s a bit older.”

“We’ll see about that! I do a face paint for Charlotte every Halloween already. It’s her favorite holiday as well.”

“That’s cute.”

The clock has passed six by a dozen minutes by the time they are done. Max slips all the make-up supplies back to his pumpkin-shaped Halloween basket (for treats, of course), and then they are good to go – once Max manages to drag Rei away from the mirror, anyway. Max doesn’t blame him for being mesmerized by his own reflection; Rei’s eyelashes are long and bold as they are, and the dark, dramatic make-up and face paint make him look like the vocalist of a punk band.

“Shouldn’t I be wearing something more interesting?” Rei asks once they step into the elevator, as if the thought only now occurs to him.

“Nah, you’re perfect as you are.” Max sincerely means it, eyeing the back of Rei’s jeans through the elevator cab’s mirror.

The Halloween party, just like all official parties held on campus, is hosted in the lounge of the student activity center building. It’s not the most spacious of places, but the decorations are on point: the building is hardly recognizable from before as it has been transformed into a witch’s hut-like dark den illuminated by a whole army of jack-o-lanterns with flickering yellow eyes and mouths (someone in the school government has been busy carving all those pumpkins); the walls and the ceiling are covered in bats and spider web and glass jars with fake eyeballs and other goofy décor that’s not particularly creative but sets the mood just right for a fun evening. The air is almost sickeningly thick with the scent of sugar.

Overall it’s a very modest party, though. Something that Max has already noticed during his studies is that the student body of a prestigious classical music school doesn’t exactly consist of the wildest of party animals. Who could have guessed? If the BBA had been a business school, now that would have been a whole different story, but all intoxicants are carefully monitored in a formal event like this. Therefore all the students are obediently standing or sitting around the numerous round tables at the venue in small groups, just chatting away and trying all the assorted Halloween snacks available at the tables without raising their voices over the music too much. (The playlist is all classical, of course, what else; Cherubini’s _Marche Funèbre_ is currently playing as Max and Rei step inside.)

After going around the room for a while, collecting candy and other edibles into the pumpkin basket, they sit down to join Hiromi and Salima at one of the tables. Hiromi is wearing a magical girl-themed costume, Salima a Gryffindor uniform.

“Aw man, I want you to dress me up next year!” Hiromi says and starts tapping Max on the shoulder once the boys have sat down. “I want to look spooky too! I can’t believe someone as cute as you can look like that! Almost didn’t recognize you at first.”

“Oh please, Hiromi-chan, no need to pour it on!”

“No! It really is an amazing look! Most people I know put on a Santa hat and call it a day or some shit like that.”

Hearing this does make Max puff up his chest in defiance. “This is the least that a real Halloween fan with any dignity should do!”

“Teach me your ways, _shishou!_ ”

“No Japanese, please,” says Salima, the only monolingual of the four, but her remark is as calm as she always is, the personification of tranquility as she sips on her orange soda with a straw that has a cartoony cardboard spider on it.

The rest grab similar cups for themselves and they talk for a while – about Halloween, then about the competition, then about anything but the competition per Hiromi’s despaired request (it hasn’t been that smooth a ride for her, she’s landed on the bottom of the scoreboard both times with her euphonium which, according to her, is really more of an ensemble instrument and not suited for a solo competition like this, to which Max can only reply that the judges must have picked her for a reason in the qualifiers) and have a good time in general.

At least Max hopes that Rei is having a good time. He’s sitting quietly next to him, eating more than talking; the Halloween-themed snacks laid out on the table are clearly his priority.

“Oh my word,” Hiromi suddenly says, pointing at something further in the room. “Look.”

Max turns to glance over his shoulder. Despite the abundance of possible sources of confusion and joy in a room full of bizarre decorations and people in stupid costumes, Max is pretty sure that the target of Hiromi’s stare is Kai Hiwatari whom he can spot among a group of the Russian students some feet away. The only thing even remotely resembling a Halloween costume on him is a pair of bright pink cat ears on his head; they clash so wildly with Kai’s usual brooding and overall masculine appearance that Max sticks his knuckles in his mouth to keep himself from bursting out laughing.

“That’s amazing,” he then says once he’s drawn in enough breath to talk, “just amazing. He’s amazing, isn’t he?”

“I’m surprised he even came to the party,” Salima says. “I mean, I never see him spend time with anyone.”

“I heard that Yuriy Ivanov wanted to originally be his accompanist,” Max remembers Manabu once telling him, “so maybe he’s already acquainted with those Russians. I never see them hang out together like that either, though.”

“And he’d be so popular if he just let people approach him!” Hiromi tosses a white chocolate-glazed strawberry ghost in her mouth. “What a waste of a hot guy, isn’t it?”

“You like him, Hiromi-chan?” Max asks with genuine curiosity. It’s not that big of a stretch, really; being the only two Japanese students in this year’s competition, it wouldn’t have been that strange for Kai and Hiromi to hit it off… if only Kai wasn’t such a train wreck of a human being – or maybe a tank, rather than a train.

“Not particularly, but you can’t deny that he _is_ hot,” the girl contemplates. “I wouldn’t mind going out with him if he didn’t look like he’ll break my neck for asking.”

“Oh, you’re spot-on,” Max agrees with a laugh. He cannot help noticing, however, how Rei is frozen in place on his left side, sporting that same distant, troubled expression that he has been spacing out with during practice all week. His eyes are fixed in the direction of Kai and the Russian students.

 _What are you looking at, Rei?_ Max wants to ask, _What are you thinking about so hard?_

“Time to go powder my nose,” Salima says at this point and leaves her seat. After watching her go for one silent beat, Hiromi suddenly leans over to Rei’s side of the table.

“So,” she says with a frown, switching to Japanese in a low voice that makes Max feel as if he is involuntarily being pulled into some sort of conspiracy circle that he wasn’t aware of, “how are things between you two, really?” She nods toward Salima’s back that’s quickly disappearing into the crowd. “Hm, Rei?”

“Huh?” Rei, whose absent-minded gaze still lingers in the distance, jerks his attention back across the table to stare at Hiromi, wide-eyed; his utter confusion is telltale sign of him not listening at all. The straw that has been hanging from his mouth now drops back to its cup.

“You little playboy, you.” She ignores Rei’s surprise and, to Max’s horror, turns to the other boy instead with that furious glare of hers. “Can you imagine, Max? He exclusively took Salima out just to tell her off so he could be with someone else. Mister Violinist here is cushioning several girls, apparently.”

Rei coughs, perhaps because of the soda that he’s just inhaled. His face has gone beetroot red and his voice is an octave higher than usual when he speaks: “N-not true – and what business does Salima have telling _you_ about it?”

“You don’t know women very well if you’re not aware that we share everything with each other, especially about men that treat us like shit. I just didn’t want to make things awkward for Salima by bringing it up in front of her!”

Max can’t but give both Hiromi and Rei a blank stare in turns. His heartbeat has suddenly switched gears to galloping uncomfortably hard inside his chest; the bottom of his stomach seems to have sunk somewhere below his knees.

“You and Salima are dating?” he hears himself asking Rei, his voice flat and strange in his own ears. Since when exactly? Could they have been going out ever since that first post-concert dinner together? It’s not even any of Max’s business – he knows it isn’t, but – the green strings of jealousy immediately tighten around his neck, daring to suffocate him right there on his seat.

“They _were_ ,” Hiromi promptly replies in Rei’s stead, “until he dumped her by telling her he’s already got someone else.”

Another blank stare. _Someone else. Could it be—_

Rei himself seems to be in the middle of a staring contest with the table between them.

“Tell me you’re at least seeing that person now?” she keeps pushing, propping herself on her elbows and reaching even further across the table, as if in a vain attempt to stick herself on the trajectory of his gaze. “Salima is way too nice to be honest about it, but you did her dirty, you know, Kon Rei!”

“That’s enough, Hiromi-chan, he got your point already!” Max finally tells her off, the rush of his own blood in his ears gradually grinding his temper as well.

“Hmph.” Hiromi slumps back in her chair and crosses her arms across her chest. “Of course you take _his_ side, Max. I just feel bad for whoever the other girl is he’s juggling with.”

Rei slams a hand on the table and stands up.

“I wasn’t seeing anyone else,” he says, his voice now surprisingly collected – and cold to the boot. “I would never two-time with people, if that’s what you’re implying. I’m not that kind of person! All I did was be honest with Salima, so leave me alone, will you?”

And then he storms off, swallowed by the dimly lit room of orange and black in the bat of an eye.

Max is paralyzed in his seat for one heart-stopping moment. Then he jumps to his feet and sprints in the direction that Rei disappeared to.

 _What am I going to do if that someone isn’t me?_ the feverish question hammers his brain. _Is Rei really seeing someone else? And how didn’t I notice he's with Salima? What a moron you are, Mizuhara Max!_

He glances around, not seeing Rei’s familiar figure anywhere. The wicked eyes of the jack-o-lanterns stare down at him from every direction, they bathe the room in flickering shadows that obscure the features of the people in disguise around him, he keeps turning round and round looking for the violinist until the flickering orange is making him dizzy; he starts running toward the main entrance, figuring that it’s the only logical place to go in this part of the room…

Max’s foot hits something hard. The next thing he knows is that he’s up in the air and the floor is coming at him – and fast.

He hits the floor face first and pain flares up his nose and left knee. He has dropped the pumpkin-shaped basket, its contents scatter on the floor around him with clink and clatter.

He hears deriding laughter somewhere behind him.

 _Ah,_ he realizes wearily, _someone tripped me._ As he attempts to get back up, wincing at the pain in his scraped knee, he hears other voices erupt behind his back as well but cannot quite make the words out; the hood of his red cloak has fallen over his head and is muffling all the sounds, amplifying the rush of his own blood in his ears instead. It takes him a moment or two to untangle the hood from the demon horns that have miraculously managed to stay in place.

As soon as Max sits up, something grabs him from behind.

His heart stops, he freezes in fear by instinct – but quickly realizes that he’s being lifted and held up firmly yet gently. It’s not the terror-inducing grip from a year ago that held him down by force.

He’s vaguely aware that some sort of commotion has started somewhere behind his back.

“Go after him,” a low voice says in his ear. Suddenly Max feels himself being tossed toward the door; he’s on his feet, and he stays on his feet, somehow; using the momentum, he runs right through and only stops once he’s safely outside, the cloak fluttering behind him like the wings of a crimson butterfly.

Catching his surprised breath for a moment, Max glances over his shoulder at the now-closed door, wondering what on Earth just happened inside. Another glance around reveals the familiar back that’s moving away in a quick, determined stride down the walkway under the yellow glow of the lampposts, and Max chooses to go after it instead of returning inside to gather his things. Whoever tripped him has probably taken them already, his make-up supplies are a lost case now. At least his phone is secured in the buttoned pocket of his satin suit.

“Rei!” he shouts into the night, the air chilly enough to bite at his fingers as he runs.

Rei stops. Max catches up to him, grabbing the sleeve of his sweater.

“Don’t worry about what she said,” Max gasps, each word coming out as a puff of white. “Hiromi-chan has a bad temper, she was just taking it out on you.”

“I don’t,” Rei says bluntly. “She’s probably right, anyway. I’m not very good at handling those things.”

The dismissive tone makes Max realize that it’s not the only reason for Rei’s current emotional turmoil. He’s struggling with something else, and it’s that something combined with Hiromi’s accusations that drove him out here.

“What’s wrong, Rei?” Max asks, hoping to sound calmer than he feels inside, and takes proper hold of Rei’s wrist. “I can see you’ve been stressed out all week. Please, tell me what’s in your mind.”

Rei doesn’t answer. He stares off into the distance for a few silent seconds, then slowly turns to look at Max – but as he does, his expression changes in an instant from contemplative melancholy to confusion.

“What happened to your nose?” he asks.

Max brings a hand up to his face, only now realizing that something wet is covering his upper lip; his nose is bleeding from hitting the floor earlier.

“Nothing,” he says quickly and starts wiping the blood on his dark sleeves, smearing them in white face paint as well in the process. “Oh, what a damn mess.”

A second later, Rei is offering him a very familiar red handkerchief. He has an amused smirk on his half-skull face as he peers down at Max.

“No need to return it this time,” he adds as Max takes the piece of cloth, “I have lots of those.” Then he sighs and tilts his head back, clearly distracted out of his solitary gloom. “Fine, I'll tell you – but not here. Let’s go somewhere else.”

They decide to take a stroll to the park located on the campus area; on a cold October evening like this, the only other people there are a lone dog-owner and a jogger passing through. No person is strange enough to come out here to sit in the cold on a Halloween party night… except for Max and Rei.

They pick a bench in the shade of a maple tree and sit down, side by side, an odd pair with their demonic face paint and quiet demeanor. Max allows Rei to collect himself for a moment without pressing him to start talking, but cannot stop his leg from fidgeting nervously from anticipation.

Rei takes a deep breath. Then he slumps forward to hold his head between his hands, elbows propped against his knees. He has crossed his fingers against his forehead, bearing the likeness of a monk preparing for prayer. His eyes closed, he begins to talk, voice strained with suppressed emotion.

“I’m so not proud of what I’m about to tell you.”

“I won’t judge,” Max promises – but there’s a wild snare of apprehension creating a tangled maze inside him, its thorns digging deeper with each quiet second that passes. He’s both deadly curious and anxious to hear what Rei has on his heart.

“I, uh… You see, the reason I wanted to come to New York with Headmaster Daitenji was actually to meet my relatives who live here. They have been constantly on my mind lately, and – I know this sounds weird, but… seeing those pink cat ears that Kai was wearing – they just reminded me of my cousin so much, it all somehow became so tangible again.”

 _So_ that’s _the direction we’re going in._ Max feels a pinch of guilt for the fact that his anxiety immediately loosens up when he realizes that this is about Rei's relatives instead of something more serious.

A sigh. “But there’s this one thing… I did something I shouldn’t have when I moved out of my home village when I was thirteen… and it makes facing my relatives so difficult.” Rei moves his hands to scrabble at his own hair. “The violin – Bai Hu – it doesn’t belong to me. It was made for my brother – my cousin. I stole it when I left the village.”

After mouthing those words, Rei draws another long breath, in and out, slow and heavy.

“We both played the violin,” he continues, “we always practiced together. The luthier in our village had made the white violin for Rai, as a present for him turning sixteen – in the tradition of our village, it meant becoming an adult, you see, so it was an important date. The violin was a custom-made gift for him. And I was so jealous, and so bewitched by that violin… I stole it and never looked back. I was young and stupid and it was nothing but an impulse decision, and I have lived with that guilt ever since. It took me years to even be able to play that thing, I was so embarrassed for what I did. And I’m still too scared to face my family for it – I’ve been here since summer and still haven’t even had the courage to look up their address.” He lets out a short, humorless laugh. “That sounds really stupid, doesn’t it? It’s pathetic, really.”

Max is unconcerned with the potential stupidity of it. He stares at Rei, not having even the faintest idea how to convey that he feels sorry for him while not admitting how _immensely_ relieved he is to hear how mundane this problem of his is in the grand scheme of things.

He has never heard anything about this from the Chens, nothing at all referring to a stolen violin in their village. Rai, Mao’s older brother, has always been a busy person whom Max has hardly ever met; he does vaguely remember Mao mentioning that he used to play the violin when he was younger but dropped the hobby when he no longer had time for it in college. He has already moved out of the Chen household to live and work on his own.

However, the topic is obviously beyond touchy to Rei who now looks utterly destroyed by his confession, his eyes glistening with held-back tears, his anguish over his old crime so palpable that it tugs right at Max’s heartstrings and instantly wipes away all of his concerns and petty emotions of envy that riddled him so only moments ago. Max’s heart swells with sympathy and fondness for this poor violinist – _his_ poor violinist – and he wraps an arm around his shoulders in consolation, hoping to radiate the warmth of his heart to the bottom of the other’s troubled soul.

“Oh, Rei. I’m sure they have long forgiven you. Don’t you think it’s their cousin they miss more than some violin?”

Rei turns to look at Max, his expression sincerely surprised, as if the thought never even crossed his mind that the Chen family might miss _him_ more than the instrument.

How lonely he must have been all these years, thinking so little of his own worth! If it wasn't for the bulky demon horns that keep him from leaning in too close, Max would lay his head on Rei’s shoulder and give in to the urge of smothering him with all the pent-up affection he harbors for him.

“You haven’t seen them in years, right?” he says and settles for giving Rei’s back a reassuring rub. “They must miss you so much. So, so much!”

Rei brushes a hand over his eyes, smudging his make-up in the process and leaving a dark stain on the back of his hand. He doesn't say anything anymore, but he doesn't move away from Max's embrace either, not immediately at least.

Not after several minutes of Max quietly comforting him, either.

Suddenly the phone in Max’s pocket breaks out to song. He jolts back, flustered, and fumbles for the pocket.

The one calling is a very frustrated Takao. _“Max, where the Hell are you?! The zipper in Kyouju’s Snickers onesie broke so we’re running late. Did you leave the party already? And did you see the fight? Seriously? A dozen dudes were going hard at each other when we got here! Then the guards came in to throw them all out. I think those Russians were in there, too?”_

* * *

When Max returns to the North Hall later (without going back to the party and, apparently, the remainders of an all-out war), he finds his pumpkin-shaped basket and all of his belongings intact inside it by the door of room number 309.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tzigane for violin and piano: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FzYge-uUCk>  
> marche funèbre: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54LrQR_DVPY>
> 
> random trivia, i made up their room numbers 505 and 309 from the syllables of their names:  
> \- 5 "go" derived from ko of kon  
> \- 0 "rei"  
> \- 5 "i"  
> \- 3 "mi" derived from mizuhara  
> \- 0 "maru" derived from ma of max  
> \- 9 "ku" from the romanization of max (makkusu).


	17. On a journey

Max stumbles through the next couple of weeks in a haze of rushed confusion and the disquiet of his heart being perpetually in his throat.

To his dismay – even shame, up to a point – he’s having trouble learning his part of _Tzigane_. The piece is acting positively elusive to him, his mind rushing through it whenever he tries to get the handle of it; he’s running through the buzz of a faraway city someplace he’s never been, filling in bits and pieces of the puzzle as he runs along its cramped alleys but never quite getting a proper picture of the song in its entirety. He sees flashes of dirty browns and grays and blues rush by, but rather than exploring the world of this piece, he feels as if something is chasing him down the streets of that exotic city and he has to pick up the pace again and again as the concert date approaches alarmingly fast, all the while he’s snowed under the midterms and bi-weekly ensemble rehearsals.

And his relationship with Rei is at an awkward standstill, or rather, it’s an exhaustingly clumsy waltz where both seem to repeatedly miss the other’s steps, all the while Hiromi’s words from the Halloween party latch onto the back of Max’s head like some living physical entity that won’t let go. _So he could be with someone else._

Rei definitely doesn’t appear eager to address it. He’s been acting as if Halloween never happened, although that fidgety uneasiness he was displaying earlier is mostly gone; his confession has clearly lifted some of the anxiety off his shoulders, and Max is even beginning to hear his violin taking on a more animated sound over the melancholy that has been persisting so far; but there is now this strange tension between the two instead that Max can’t ignore, the cord between them suddenly so tight and off key. Whenever he’s alone with Rei, he can definitely sense that magnetism between them, a subtle force that keeps pulling Max in – and whenever they’re apart, he questions whether it’s not just all wishful thinking on his part.

It doesn’t help that the girls of Rei’s fan club at BBA have now clearly deemed the pianist approachable and innocent-looking enough to ask him for second-hand information on Rei, including his relationship status. A whole lot of people are apparently very eager to know if he's available for dating.

“That’s what _I_ want to know,” is what Max would like to say but knows that it's not an appropriate response, and not even any of Max’s business, not really. He would _want_ it to be his business, but it isn’t… for now.

While Max isn’t overjoyed about being asked such questions, he still vastly prefers it over being asked how he managed to become Rei’s accompanist. This is usually followed by some variation of “is it true it’s an arrangement done by your mother?”. The gossip is so widely spread by now that no amount of correction from Max is enough to exhaust the flames; he can tell them the truth all he wants but it’s not what anybody actually wants to hear.

Max isn’t entirely sure if he’s only imagining things, but he has noticed a curious trend of these awkward situations being resolved by the sudden appearance of Kai Hiwatari. As unlikely as it sounds, the cellist has appeared out of nowhere to drive people away or derail their attention – just by existing in his full gritty galore; he never even utters a word – a few too many times for it to be mere coincidence anymore. Max has no idea how or why Kai is doing this, or whether he pulls similar stunts for other people as well. They have hardly spoken to each other, and Max is fairly certain that Kai wouldn’t waste his time keeping an eye on Max or following him around. He’s just… there. A silent knight in leather jacket armor and swords for eyes.

_Does that make me a princess? Fuck._

It feels more plausible that Kai is doing this for the sake of Rei’s reputation, rather than Max’s – they are both contestants proper after all, they probably know each other better behind the scenes than Max has so far witnessed. What does he actually know; those two could be close.

It’s hard to tell if Kai has any interest in other people, though.

* * *

The third competition concert turns out weird, to say the least.

Thanks to the fistfight that occurred in the Halloween party, Boris and his accompanist Yuriy have been disqualified from the third round and default to getting zero points (to which they loudly protested that Kai Hiwatari was there as well without any consequences as Kai wasn’t caught red handed by the guards, unlike the Russians). This means less competition, and no competition on the violin for Rei.

It doesn’t exactly go according to plan, any of it. Their _Tzigane_ teeters on the edge of a catastrophe due to Max’s shaky grab on the piece, already challenging as it is, and lack of successful practice sessions. And yet, Rei somehow manages to bring it home and most of the judges are surprisingly optimistic with their scoring, praising it as a worthwhile risk and fitting the theme of “On a journey” exceptionally well despite the unpolished performance. They receive 40 points which, everything considered, is more than Max expected after his amateurish blunder on the piano keys. (Rei tries to afterwards argue that he didn't mess up even half as badly as he thinks he did.)

Once again, Kai’s name sits at the top of the scoreboard, and after three rounds it’s starting to look like nobody is able to hold the heir of the Hiwatari Enterprise back from winning the whole thing. Max has noted that it doesn’t bother Rei even half as much as it clearly bothers Ralf Jürgens, also an heir of a big name family who probably has much more riding on this competition than someone like Rei, a lone violinist without the burden of a family of musicians. Max sincerely hopes that they will beat Ralf in the overall score once this is all over; it would be worth it seeing the defeat on his hawk-like face. They currently linger five points behind him. Boris has fallen quite painfully behind due to the missed concert and cushions the bottom of the scoreboard, a position that’s been consistently held by Hiromi so far. This leaves Rick in fourth place, now right behind Rei and Max.

Being over and done with the third round is a relief. Max gets to catch a short break after, as the contestants are all scheduled to spend the following weekend in a “training camp” off campus – an annual tradition in the competition and an ordeal that Max has hair-raising memories of from last year. To put it simply, it's a hotel weekend for the contestants that they are supposed to spend bonding and training together.

“Just don’t agree to anything stupid out there,” he advices Rei.

Since the training camp weekend means no post-concert dinner party, Max instead invites Rei to a donut date afterwards… not that he presents it as a date, but it’s Max’s treat regardless to make up for his poor performance. Rei still doesn’t have the heart to admit that the lukewarm score is Max’s fault – although it obviously is – but he never says no to donuts.

After his confession on the Halloween night, Rei has gradually become more loose-lipped about his life before he met Daitenji and especially the span of a couple of years that he spent traveling before ending up in Japan. Once bribed with some chocolate-glazed donuts, he’s now eagerly telling Max about his school life in Hong Kong, and the casinos of Macao and streets of Guangzhou where he earned enough money to continue his travels; how he did odd jobs in Chinese-owned restaurants and traveled to Nepal and India; and how he finally ended up in Oosaka in hopes of building a new life for himself after years of aimless wander, living on scraps and playing the violin to whoever was willing to listen, all the while sleeping under a bare sky more often than he would have liked.

Max is both delighted and deeply touched by the fact that Rei finally feels comfortable enough around him to talk so freely about his past. On the other hand, the bile of guilt is now burning at the back of Max’s throat for the fact that he himself still hasn’t been able to mention that he knows Rei’s relatives. It feels weird to keep quiet about such a prominent common factor between them but bringing it up in a way that would make sense at this point proves difficult, even for Max who is generally suave.

When Max carefully inquires whether Rei has contacted his cousins yet, Rei only shakes his head and turns a notch pale.

“I’m so stressed out that they’ll discover I’m here from one of the magazines before I manage to contact them myself,” he says, “I almost refused all the articles because of it. What if they see me with the violin and recognize it?”

“I don’t blame you. It’s difficult to speak up after such a long time.” If Max is having a hard time bringing up a completely harmless thing that he’s kept quiet about for only a month, he cannot even imagine what it’s like for Rei who’s been hiding for almost ten years. He knows that when something is kept a secret for long enough, it eventually ceases to be about the original subject of the secret – rather, one’s inability to open their mouth about it for so long becomes the real burden, and the longer the situation persists, the harder it becomes to overcome that mountain of purposeful silence and the debris of shame that the flow of time has piled on top of whatever the original issue was (which in this case, he’s fairly sure, has been long forgotten by everyone except Rei).

 _Ah, well._ Max can sympathize with Rei’s concern, but a part of him is hoping that Mao does see an article about the competition somewhere now. It would make this whole mess untangle on its own; Max could tell Mao he had no idea of Rei being her cousin and vice versa, and that would be the end of that.

Alas, nothing ever works out so smoothly in life.

The training camp weekend’s Saturday is perhaps the first day ever when Max doesn’t mind at all that Judy has arranged one of their mother-and-son bonding sessions without asking him, not only for the welcome distraction but because spending the weekend at home gives him an excuse to avoid meeting up with Mao, who knows Max far too well and would undoubtedly interrogate him again about his emotional whereabouts. She would read him like an open book; better not to even present the book to her. Not yet, anyway.

 _I’m gonna tell her all about it soon enough_ , he swears to himself, _I definitely will._


	18. Hands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i guess there should maybe be a content warning for physical abuse in this chapter, nothing graphic though but just so nobody is caught negatively by surprise.

Max spends the weekend at home, once again playing with Charlotte during the day and, once again, trying to breathe new life into his Milky Way Song during the night, inevitably failing to change its course anymore. Perhaps it’s time to scrap it and get a fresh start – to compose something new that will not revolve around a certain violinist in any shape or form. (He ignores the fact that the Milky Way Song wasn’t about Rei in the first place.)

But no divine spark of inspiration comes to him, and he returns to the campus empty-handed and somewhat frustrated.

Over their shared lunch break on Monday, the ever-so-informed Manabu is dutifully prepared to report the gossip he has gathered about the training camp weekend. Most of it is ordinary stuff, such as Ralf acting like an ass throughout the whole thing to both fellow contestants and the hotel staff (he was disappointed over the lack of a sauna for his private use), and Hiromi apparently latching onto Kai in a vain attempt to perhaps catch his attention. Takao is, as usual, pretending not to be interested while keenly listening to every word as he munches on his chicken teriyaki sandwich.

“By far the most interesting thing I heard,” Manabu says, “is that Kon Rei and Boris Kuznetsov had some kind of violin showdown – and sounds like it got intense. Rei had to take his violin to be fixed because one of the strings snapped. That's where it ended, apparently, so it was Boris's victory.”

“And I told him not to agree to anything stupid!” Max says, his delighted expression the opposite of his words. Not only does a “violin showdown” sound absolutely fantastic, he’s surprised to hear about the gentle Rei he knows having such a fierce side to him. Needless to say, Max deduces that a training session is unlikely to happen that afternoon with the White Tiger out of commission.

However, to his further surprise, Rei replies to his inquiring message that he’ll be able to pick the violin up after classes and can therefore make it to the practice room by four. They can start planning the fourth round of the competition today.

After classes, Max ventures to the basement floor of the main building to fetch the pad with all his notes and scores – he prefers to use a secured locker for them over leaving his things at the dorms. There, he discovers that someone has left him a present on the locker door. It’s a piece of paper, taped on the locker, calling him a variety of lovely bigoted names and telling him to fuck off from the BBA.

It’s nothing he hasn’t heard before. Hate mail was a frequent delicacy during the previous year of the competition.

“I think it’s weird you’re not more popular,” he remembers Takao once telling him with the purpose of encouraging him after one similar message. “I mean… blonde hair, big blue eyes, what else do people here want? You look like a pop star. Totally white-passing, too. How are you not mad popular with girls?”

Max also remembers Mao judging him a couple years back for his habit of friend-zoning just about anybody who’s obviously interested in him, which he admittedly doesn’t even notice doing. Max himself crushes on people easily, especially on guys who are his type, but he’s also generally nice to anybody who’s friendly with him and rarely even considers the romantic side of things. He hasn’t had a single serious relationship – multiple flings and other one-time experiments that mostly happened in a whim, yes, but nothing that could have been called dating. (Or at least Max didn’t call them that.)

This is the very reason he’s feeling so oddly insecure about his feelings toward Rei now. It’s not something that the easy-going, free-spirited Max Mizuhara has ever experienced before.

“You’re one to talk,” he pointed out to Mao during the aforementioned conversation, “how many guys have _you_ dated?”

Mao zipped her lips in frustration for a minute before huffing: “At least I’m trying!”

True enough, Mao had had several attempts with potential boyfriend candidates before – and they had all failed due to her intimidating the guys and scaring them away in the end. Mao did give rather mixed signals with her petite Asian frame and cutesy pink look to anybody who didn’t actually know about her fierce personality.

“We guys are a bit simple,” Max said in consolation, “you’re just too good for us. Too many layers. It gets men confused.”

“Imagine not thinking with your one-dimensional dick for a second,” Mao groaned.

Max chuckles now thinking back to this remark by her (which was also arguably true in his case), going deep down that memory lane while auto-piloting down the school corridors on his way to the usual practice room. He’s not in any particular hurry, he has fifteen more minutes before the clock strikes four, but has a bad habit of half-running everywhere anyway, at least on good days when he can hardly restrain his bubbly self with too much energy to throw around, too many places to go.

 _Ah, Mao, how I miss that brutal tongue of yours._ _Lashes like a whip._ It feels like a lifetime ago that they hung out together on a daily basis, and while they both had their teenage struggles, it still felt like a simpler time than the present.

Not looking where he’s going, Max cuts around a corner and crashes right into someone, a couple of girls who are just about to move away from a coffee vending machine. The other girl’s cup of hot water falls over on its tray and spills its contents with a splash, mostly on the carpeted floor and a hand that Max instinctively raises for cover.

The girls let out a gasp in unison. For a moment they are a mess of “oops!” and “sorry!” and “damn!”, up to the point of one of them very audibly whispering to the other: “That’s Judy Tate’s son…!” This realization then draws a couple of nervous giggles out of the pair, who ultimately decide to take flight and scurry away instead of going back to re-fill the cup or staying behind for proper apologies.

Max is hardly listening. He doesn’t throw a single glance the girls’ way. He’s frozen in place, his right hand still suspended in mid-air. He stares down at it in wide-eyed panic, the fingers of his left hand now digging into his right wrist as if his life depended on it.

Several silent seconds pass by before he resumes walking down the practice wing’s corridor with lumbering, faltering steps. He bumps his left shoulder on the wall several times on the way, never taking his eyes off the hand in his own grip. Once at the correct door, he’s forced to tear his left hand away and reach for the identification tag in his pocket; after several seconds of fumbling around, his breathing growing increasingly more laborious and fast-paced with each failed attempt to retrieve the tag between his clumsy fingers, he finally manages to take it and slams it on the slate next to the door. The plastic tag then slips past his fingers and drops silently on the carpet; ignoring it, Max hauls himself inside the practice room. He collapses against the nearest wall and slides down to the floor, his right hand still in front of him, now trembling uncontrollably with his erratic breath. Panic crashes into him and washes over him like a tsunami, it engulfs him in the blindfolded darkness of a December night from nearly a year ago and overwhelms him with its pulsating hysteria. His body is simultaneously burning and freezing, his fingertips numb and bristly. His lungs are being filled by liquid panic and he's sinking, hot air stuck in his throat and caught in his chest and he gasps for air in despair.

 _Not my hands,_ the compulsive mantra repeats in his head, _not my hands, not my hands, not my hands._ A whimper escapes his lips and he presses his eyes shut, tears staining his freckled cheeks. _It hurts. It hurts. It hurts._

Then, a gentle yet firm hand grabs him. It pulls him back to the surface.

“Are you alright? Max? You’re hyperventilating. You need to breathe more slowly – breathe through your nose. Come on, like this.”

Max opens his eyes and they meet Rei’s gaze, steady yet full of concern, the color of the gentle afternoon sun.

And so very close to Max’s face.

Rei has knelt in front of him on the practice room’s floor. One of his hands is on Max’s shoulder – the saving hand that pulled him back to the present.

Still out of breath but no longer erratically so, Max carefully draws air into his lungs. He looks down at his right hand. The back has the slightest hue of fleshy red, a barely visible blotch that hardly even feels like anything. He realizes that the pain must all have been in his head.

“Sorry,” he mumbles and quickly proceeds to wipe his teary face on his shirt sleeves.

“Did something happen?” Rei asks patiently, and the lack of judgment in his voice almost annoys Max who is fully aware how ludicrous having a full-blown panic attack over something so small is.

With a barely audible sigh and an avoidant side-glance, Max replies: “Not really. I bumped into someone in the corridor and some hot water spilled on me.”

“Are you hurt?”

 _This is it._ There’s no way around telling about it to Rei now, Max quickly realizes – and why wouldn’t he, anyway? This is the second time already that Rei has helped him out in a time of trouble, not to mention that he already managed to persuade Rei to spill the beans about his own past. Not only does Max owe Rei the truth at this point, he’s suddenly struck by the feeling of – of what exactly, he doesn’t know how to put it into words, but the care and concern radiating from Rei’s reassuring presence makes Max want to confide in him. For once, he finds himself wanting to rely on someone else instead of surviving on his own.

“No,” he says. “It really was nothing – it just brought back the memory of a thing that happened before.”

And so he tells Rei all about it.

On the final concert night of last year’s music competition, only a few minutes before Max was supposed to enter the stage, he was knocked out cold by the concert hall bathrooms. His memories of the exact events are all-around muddy and tarnished by fear and anxiety and shame, but he does remember regaining his consciousness only to find that he couldn’t see, couldn’t talk, couldn’t move – his eyes had been blindfolded, his mouth gagged, his limbs tied up while someone was holding him down against a cold surface with crushing weight that nearly knocked the wind out of him.

It wasn’t the worst of it, though. The worst part was that his hands were then forced under what must have been a faucet in the bathroom, and the faucet turned to as far as it could go on the hot end. The pain was nothing like Max had ever felt or has felt since. It was so mind-numbing that he thought for a moment that he would die.

Obviously, he didn’t. He must have passed out a second time, because the next thing he has a clear memory of is being in one of the closed bathroom stalls, no longer tied up, with nobody in the proximity for all he could tell. He had no idea whether the concert was already over or not, but he regardless remained in the stall until a janitor came in to check the premises for the night, at which point he bolted out and called his parents, coming up with a haphazard lie about an accident that he’s had to live up to ever since. Due to sheer luck and coincidence, Judy hadn’t come to the concert because Charlotte was suffering from pneumonia and she was in the hospital with her, allowing Max to construct a story about hurting himself before the concert.

Both of his hands had first-degree burns on them, and he couldn’t play the piano for a month. His absence on the final round was deemed an unfortunate incident but was quickly forgotten by most people. Nearly all the harrassment he had suffered that fall also magically stopped at that point.

“So,” Max concludes his monologue, looking down at his right hand, “when I felt hot water spill on me… I guess I just blacked out for a minute. I don’t really know why… This hasn’t happened before.”

He’s so absorbed in talking that only once he finishes, he realizes how hard Rei is squeezing the shoulder that his hand never left. Max can feel him shaking a little beside him.

“Did you tell the police about it?” Rei asks then, quietly, the struggle of remaining calm audible in his voice. “I mean, that’s an assault… just a straight-up assault.”

Max shakes his head. He’s finding it difficult to look Rei in the eye. “I didn’t tell anyone, except my best friend much later.” And much like the first time, when he described the same events to Mao, it doesn’t quite feel like Max is talking about a real thing that happened to himself. It’s as if he’s reciting a story about some other person, the trauma of it all so tangible that he’s actively distancing himself from it for his own sanity. Mao did encourage him to go to therapy about it, but Max wasn’t comfortable with the idea. He still isn't. It's such a strange thought, imagining him of all people in therapy.

“Besides,” Max then adds, “I have no idea who did it. I couldn’t see them – I didn’t recognize any voices.” He has, of course, thought about it long and hard for the past eleven months, and has a fairly educated guess – there really is only one person he can think of who has a history of getting violent with him and has tons of goons that would do anything if their baseball cap-wearing idol encouraged it. But Max has no proof that would tie Michael Summers to the case in any shape or form – or anybody else, to that matter. Nobody has come forth to him as a witness because the whole ordeal happened during the concert.

There’s a momentary silence. Rei seems to notice how hard he is holding Max’s shoulder and loosens his grab, but he doesn’t pull his hand away completely. Max turns to stare at the long fingers sliding down his own forearm.

“Why… Why would anyone do that to you?” Rei asks. The sadness in his voice strikes Max’s heart like a dagger of ice. “I don’t understand.”

Max can’t help a humorless snort of a laugh and a lopsided grin escape him. “I’m not exactly popular at school, if you haven’t noticed yet. You already know how people talk about me. And I was leading the scoreboard at the time. Someone figured out how to wipe me off the surface of Earth.”

Rei blinks, confused. “You mean it was because of the competition? Would someone really do that? Because of something so meaningless?”

Max wants to argue that the annual BBA competition isn’t “meaningless”, that it’s actually quite a big deal to the students who get to participate, Rei included, but he’s cut off by Rei suddenly grabbing both of his shoulders and forcing Max to finally turn to face him. Rei looks pale, much paler than usual, the warm hue of his eyes now gone and replaced by the faded brown of shock and concern.

“Max,” he says, “has someone tried to hurt you because you’re in the competition again this year? Because I asked you to be my accompanist?”

“No,” Max immediately replies, startled by the intensity of Rei’s countenance, usually so gentle and mellow. “Or,” he then adds and averts his eyes from the other, the memory of someone tripping him on Halloween flooding back, “it’s nothing serious, at least. And,” he hurries to continue as Rei begins to stir rather agitatedly, “I chose to accompany you – I wanted to do it because I want to play with you. I don’t care what anyone else thinks.” He presses a couple of fingers between his eyes, shaking his head as if to shed off the last remains of this awkward conversation. “No, Rei, stop looking at me like that, I swear it’s fine. I don’t know what’s wrong with me today, I’m sorry you had to see that. I totally messed up our practice.”

“It’s not your fault. But promise me you’ll tell me if someone tries to do anything to you, okay? You can call me any time, I don’t mind. Oh – and – and you dropped this.” Rei reaches for his pocket and takes out the identification tag. Very gently, as if Max was made of glass, Rei takes his left hand and plants the tag on its palm.

 _Damn_ , Max thinks, _I think he actually cares about me. Like, he_ really _does._ There’s no violinist out there who would be this concerned about their accompanist just because they play the piano for them. Max is pretty sure that even his own mother hasn’t ever looked this upset or protective over him. Has anybody, really?

 _Does this mean he_ does _like me?_

Or then Rei could just be a very kind and caring person, that’s all. They are friends with each other by now, right?

But are they _only_ friends? Or are they partners? Or maybe…

Maybe it’s better to just not think about it at all. _The system is overheating. Shutting down all operations._

The mood in the room is all too somber for his liking now. Desperate to lighten things up, Max’s eyes land on the black violin case that’s sitting on the floor next to Rei.

“I heard you got into a scuffle with Boris,” he says, a curious smile rising to his lips. “A payback for him missing the third round?”

Rei huffs a little. “That guy’s violin is harsh,” he says. “You should have heard him play Ernst’s _Erlkönig_. I don’t know how he does it, but his notes are so sharp, they cut through like some Siberian whirlwind or something.” He shudders, as if momentarily ravaged by the cold of his metaphor. “Ugh. So, anyway – the fourth round—”

“Could you…” Max cuts him short and leans a bit forward, shifting his legs and realizing that his lower body has begun to bristle from the numbness of sitting frozen in place for so long, “…play something for me? Something that’s got nothing do with the competition. I’m feeling kind of fed up with all that right now.” He doesn’t want to admit that he’s all too shaken to take the reigns of the piano now, his hands still trembling from the intensity of the traumatic flashback. He’s feeling thoroughly exhausted after going through that experience again.

Rei gives him a surprised look, but only a brief one. Without questioning Max's request, he snaps the violin case open and lifts the black-and-white instrument by its neck. Max stares at Rei take position next to him on the floor and place the violin on his shoulder, his legs crossed underneath him.

“Sure, what do you want to hear?” Rei asks.

“You’re going to play while sitting down?”

Rei shrugs. “I call it the lazy way.”

Max leans back against the wall and brings his hands together in his lap. “Play something nice. Something to calm the nerves. You know the violin better than me.”

“Hmm, all right.”

And so Rei does. He closes his eyes and after a couple of experimental scales to check the tune of his newly fixed strings, he dives effortlessly into the music, the bow in his right hand dancing across the strings with the grace of a flowing river.

Max recognizes the piece as one of Bach's sonatas but doesn’t care to remember which. At first he watches Rei play, rests his blue-eyed gaze on Rei’s focused yet relaxed features, the long, dark eyelashes and the slender fingers that scurry along the music with deceptive ease; and for a moment, he finds himself fixated on the arc of Rei’s pale lips, his thoughts lost in the fantasy of what they would feel like against his own.

Eventually, however, Max begins to drift off and shuts his eyes, his senses all attuned to the deep blues and aquamarines of the sonata. It wraps itself around him like a blanket, tranquil and soothing, relieving all the tension in his body and washing it away with the elegant sound of the violin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> erlkönig: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWNCbpwC-PQ>  
> violin sonata no. 1: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRKy3kX8XUM>


End file.
